Jennifer Beasley
Profile of Jennifer Beasley
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Jennifer Beasley has worked at the Dovigi Orthopaedic Sports Medicine Clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital for over 8 years, a position she got in part because they were looking for someone with experience and maturity to work with patients who experienced unique challenges, which Jennifer got from her previous career. With this experience she has gotten to treat patients in the hospital, who often have more serious conditions than she’d see in another type of practice environment.
Some patients she’s seen in the hospital have included patients in the ICU who had Guillain-Barré syndrome, or ALS, patients who have recently had various different types of surgery, people in palliative care and high-risk obstetrics patients. In her experience, massage therapy has been very beneficial for patients in the hospital.
“Massage has sometimes resolved muscle pain that the morphine hasn’t addressed, and patients temporarily forget they are in a hospital. I’ve found these experiences to be very rewarding,” Jennifer said.
Often, Jennifer is seeing patients who are seeing multiple different practitioners. She has access to an Electronic Medial Record (EMR) system where she can read clinical notes from the other practitioners as well as often view imagining reports as well. She can also send messages to other practitioners using the EMR system to discuss a patient’s condition or treatment. She also often sees other professionals such as nurses, doctors and physiotherapists in passing and she finds the opportunity to have informal discussions with them about how the patient is progressing and responding to treatment to be extremely valuable.
“I think open communication and explaining what you can offer are important,” Jennifer said. “I have found the practitioners in a patient’s circle of care to be enthusiastic about the benefits of massage.”
When it comes to treating inpatients in the hospital, Jennifer finds that several skills are important to help her be successful. Skill and experience in treating a wide range of musculoskeletal complaints and conditions, as well as a flexibility to treat someone you might not be able to position in an idea way are factors that Jennifer has found important to success. She found that the most important factor is recognizing the difficult situation that inpatients are facing.
“When it comes to treating inpatients, being compassionate and patient is important,” Jennifer said. “They’ve often experienced considerable trauma.”
There are also other factors that make working with inpatients challenging in a different way as compared to other practice environments. This is primarily related to the hospital environment itself as well as the regular routine demands on a patient’s time in the hospital that can interrupt your massage therapy treatment.
“Treatments can be interrupted by doctors on rounds, or nurses checking vitals or giving meds, or a slot becoming available for imaging,” she said. “You also need to work around medical equipment and hospital beds, and sometimes need other staff to help reposition patients for treatment.”
Once an RMT gets used to these differences, Jennifer feels that there are a variety of different reasons RMTs can be a valuable addition to these types of teams. This can include the hands-on soft tissue experience inherent with massage therapy and decrease a hypersensitized nervous system. It’s also important to recognize the different ways that massage therapy can help improve patient outcomes.
“Massage can help improve range of motion, and decrease pain that may allow patients to progress faster with rehabilitative exercise,” Jennifer said. “Some patients report that massage is more helpful for their condition than other modalities.”
Jennifer feels that her experience has highlighted the fact that it’s important for all RMTs to develop strong relationships with other health professionals so that the RMT can have a fuller understanding of a variety of conditions and how they can best be addressed, which will often be by a cooperative team of professionals.