Recent History – 1999
Sept. 30, 1999, By Charity Wallace, Daily News Staff
Dawson Creek Physiotherapy Clinic is currently the number one clinic in the province for Work Conditioning. The clinic received the award from the Workers Compensation Board after an Angus Reid survey ranked them first out of 70 clinics working with the WCB program.
David Lowe is a physiotherapist at the clinic and explained that the program is designed to treat injured workers.
“For the last four years we have been operating the program consisting of more industrial rehabilitation” he says. “This program consists of function exercises, education, stretching and hydrotherapy.”
Lowe says that the idea of the program is to simulate a working day for the patients so they can get back to work and stay working. The program includes exercises that strengthen the areas around the injury and improve general fitness. There is a lot of pushing, pulling and lifting in order to prepare clients for their jobs. Information on the exercises, recovery, prevention, and nutrition are some of the things that a person in this program may learn.
The clinic serves the northeastern part of the province including Fort St. John, Tumbler Ridge, Chetwynd, Dawson Creek and Fort Nelson.
“The clients work four hours a day, five days a week for an average of twenty days,” he says. “The quality of the program is monitored by WCB by outcomes.”
The outcomes are broken down into four areas, says Lowe, client satisfaction, length of time in the program, the durability in the work place and whether or not they return to work without any restrictions. There are usually about eight clients in the program at one time.
To ensure the quality of the program and to make sure that all procedures are being followed Thor Butler, who is the quality insurance supervisor from the WCB, checks up on clinics and makes surprise visits.
“It’s my job to make sure that the client is getting the proper care and not, for example, only getting one hour of therapy rather than four or that the class sizes aren’t too large,” Butler says.
Butler says that the WCB program is doing phenomenally well and that the statistics collected by Angus Reid show incredible success rates.
“For client satisfaction we are rated 8.8 out of a possible 10,” he says. “The percentage of clients that are discharged have an 89 per cent success rate when returning back to work, which is the highest it has ever been.”
Lowe said that it takes more than one person to run this program. Kathrine Lowe is the program manager, Kim Hughes-Brinsky is a kinesiologist at the facility, Monica Doberowski is an exercise assistant, Tina Middleton is the receptionist for the clinic and Lowe and Helen Finch are the physiotherapists.