Dr. Julie Brauer // #GeriOnICE // www.ptonice.com  In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, join Modern Management of the Older Adult lead faculty Julie Brauer discusses the ins & outs of daily life as an acute care physical therapist. Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes, or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog. If you're looking to learn more about live courses designed to better serve older adults in physical therapy or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab. EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION JULIE BRAUERWelcome to the PT on ICE Show brought to you by the Institute of Clinical Excellence. My name is Julie. I am a member of the older adult division. Thank you for spending some time on your Wednesday morning with me. Let's dive right in. So one of the most common questions that I receive from students and clinicians is is asking me about acute care. Should I go into acute care? Should I choose home health over acute care? And I'm having a lot of conversations with folks about pros and cons. and sharing my reflections from having been in acute care and home health and inpatient rehab and outpatient and private and home with older adults. So I figured I would do a podcast and bring all these thoughts that I've been having in these individual discussions to all of you. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go through a list of five to seven things that I believe are the most important characteristics of acute care and will help you decide if acute care is the right setting for you and if you are going to thrive in that setting. Okay, so number one, this is what I believe is the most important characteristic that sets acute care apart and will be the biggest factor in helping you determine if you are going to thrive in this setting. All right, number one is that in acute care you have complete autonomy over your day. You have complete autonomy over your schedule. This ended up being The reason why I feel like I thrived the most in acute care is because I wanted full autonomy over how I structured my day. So let me explain what that means. So when I was working in the hospital, I would walk into work, you clock in, and you are more than likely going to be given a list of patients. It is then up to you to decide which of those patients you're going to see. Are they appropriate to be seen? So you're doing some triaging there and you have autonomy to make that choice. And then you get to decide, most importantly, what your day looks like. When do you go see those patients? And this was so key for me. I don't like to be in a box. I don't like to be back to back all day. I like to create my own day. And so I would look at my list and depending on how intense or complex the patients were, depending on my energy levels for the day, I would decide, like, okay, I'm going to knock out a bunch of my patients in the morning. Back to back to back, get it done, and then go eat lunch, and then in the afternoon when my energy stores are down, that's when I do the majority of my documentation. So my afternoon, I wouldn't really have to see any patients, maybe one, and the majority of it was documenting. Or if sitting around and documenting for a long time is something that fatigues you, you can do a system where you go see a patient, then you document. You see a patient, then you document. So if you are someone who really needs that energy reset after pouring into a human, typically one that's very sick and there's lots of complexities and you need a little bit of a break and a breather, you can set your day up so that you get that break after every single patient or perhaps after two p