Volume 17, No. 1, Winter 2009
As with any other business, hospitals also constantly seek to expand their range of customer services.
You can do this by adding new staff, or by current employees learning new skills. The Rehabilitation Hospital of the Cape and Islands in Sandwich (RHCI) recently has gone both routes.
They have added their first hospitalist to the medical staff, Dr. Sherri A. Tupper. And they announced that Outpatient Physical Therapy Supervisor Laurie Crocker, PT, a 12-year staffer, has just been recognized as one of only six practitioners in the state to be certified in the Maitland Approach of manual therapy.
* Hospitalists, as the word implies, work on-site at the institution where they may be called upon to deal with a variety of situations as they arise.
Dr. Tupper, formerly co-director of the hospitalist program at Cape Cod Hospital, joined the region’s only rehabilitation hospital in December.
A specialist in internal medicine, she explains, “My knowledge of managing diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, electrolyte imbalances and other problems allows me to be an on-site consultant for patients with complicating medical conditions.”
According to Dr. David M. Lowell, RHCI’s medical director, the timing of Dr. Tupper’s arrival couldn’t better. “The evolution of care within inpatient rehabilitation facilities… means that more and more of our rehabilitation patients also have underlying complex medical conditions that need focused management. Dr. Tupper adds another layer to the expertise of our rehabilitation physicians.”
A native Cape Codder, Dr. Tupper, 47, graduated from Barnstable High School before pursuing a medical degree from New York Medical College.
After running medical clinics in Connecticut, Dr. Tupper directed the internal medicine residency program at St. Vincent’s Medical Center then served as Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine.
She returned to the Cape in 2001 and resides in West Yarmouth. Dr. Tupper received the Physician of the Year award in 2005 from the National Physician Advisory Council.
* According to Ms. Crocker, while perhaps little known, the Maitland Approach to physical therapy has been around for almost 50 years since Geoffrey Maitland developed the theory in Australia.
“It’s not massage, it’s manual therapy,” she explains. “You look at patient to see the particular area that’s involved. You’re not ‘global,’ you’re specific. You check for joint mobility and muscle strength, then work on the symptoms. In other words, ‘if it’s stuck, you push on it.’”
Ms. Crocker says there are so few certified practitioners of this approach because “it’s time-consuming for the courses and once you complete them you have to pay for the certification. And there’s no guarantee you’ll pass the test, which takes a full weekend.”
Ms. Crocker said it took her three years to complete the 180 hours of course work and she had to go to Seattle for the final exam.
“Actually, I’ve been using the techniques over three years with very good results,” she reports. “It limits the amount of time required to treat patients. They’re in and out quicker and there’s less pain. It’s effective with any muscular-skeletal condition…low back pain, rotator cuff, knees.”
Ms. Crocker says she made the effort to add this skill to her repertoire because “I’d been in physical therapy for 24 yrs and I wanted to grow professionally and I do feel I’m now a better clinician.”
Ms. Crocker, who joined RHCI in 1996, graduated with high honors from Cal State-Fresno in 1984. She resides with her family in Sandwich.
Oh, yes, of the six certified Maitland practitioners in the Massachusetts, Ms. Crocker is the only woman. But that’s no big deal, she says. “There are many other women in other states…and in some they outnumber the men.”