36 | December 2021
number of practitioners in its ranks— about half—leave as stay-in-place orders were issued in Alaska. In March 2020, seeing the writing on the wall, Phelps put everyone who wasn’t in the clinic on layoff status. Those that remained took cuts to their benefits as they prepared to ride out the long storm while continuing to care for their communities.
Advanced Physical Therapy
H E A LT H C A R E SPEC I A L SEC T I O N
services they provided were essential, explains Valerie Phelps, founder and practice director at Advanced Physical Therapy. Phelps grew Advanced Physical Therapy in Alaska from four therapists in 2002 to more than eighty employees operating in Seward, Soldotna, Wasilla, Fairbanks, and Anchorage before the beginning of the pandemic. “Half the staff thought that we were not essential, and the other half thought we were essential,” says Phelps, who was firmly on the essential side of the discussion. Physical therapists keep people out of emergency rooms, help optimize immune systems, and support better health and wellbeing. All important services—especially during the pandemic, Phelps says. “They stopped surgery for what, three or four months?” Phelps says. “We were working to help people survive [and] not go down a rabbit hole of drug abuse or alcohol abuse and self-medication while they were waiting for surgery.” Like many physical therapy providers, Advanced Physical Therapy saw a huge
“We're not in it for the money, we're in it because of the love of care and the love of patients,” says Phelps, who continued to work with patients despite being in her sixties and having two autoimmune diseases. Patient numbers also dropped by about 50 percent for Advanced Physical
Therapy. Initially they dropped to 30 percent, and then trended downward over the next six months to 50 percent. “The Advanced Physical Therapy paradigm of treatment,” according to Phelps, “is you need to restore integrity of the myofascial structures and the joints and the movement system before you ask it to move, before you do strengthening, endurance, balance coordination, that kind of thing.” Phelps explains how her services can extend beyond what is normally thought of as physical therapy to assessing and triaging acute, recurrent, or chronic musculoskeletal injuries, helping keep people out of hospitals at a time when healthcare facilities are hitting their capacity due to surges in COVID patients.
Improving Outcomes It’s been a balancing act for healthcare providers to determine when and how to provide different treatments for patients. “We tried to do some more handsoff [work], especially with the COVIDpositive patients, and we collaborated with nursing and respiratory therapy
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