Serving the community for more than 77 years, Mercy Medical Center St. Mary’s has received numerous awards and recognition as a leading healthcare provider in East Tennessee.
Mercy Medical Center St. Mary’s is a 370 bed facility that is the flagship hospital of Mercy Health Partners and offers a full spectrum of services including:
- Cardiac Care
- Orthopedics
- Cancer Care
- Surgical Services
- Stroke Center
- Rehabilitation
- Women’s Health
- Diagnostic and Imaging
- Behavioral Services
- Diabetes Management Center
- Senior Services
- Pain Management Center
- Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy
- Sleep Disorders Center
- And many more
Jenny, 2 years ago
Did you really learn anything?
Absolutely! I became a pro at doing evals! I got to see how multiple comorbidities can affect real patients and learned how to modify my plan of care to accommodate those comorbidities.
Would you recommend it to other students? If so, why? If not, why not?
Definitely! I wasn’t looking forward to having to do an acute hospital rotation, but I loved this clinical! My CI and the rest of the acute PT team were fantastic and only too happy to share their experiences. This clinical provided me with an opportunity to see a diverse patient population and I learned a lot! The PTs rotate between the main hospital and the ortho tower so you aren’t stuck in just one area for the whole clinical.
Were there other students while you were there?
Yes! There was another PT student in acute during part of my clinical, but she had a different CI. The hospital also has an inpatient rehab setting and a transitional care setting and each of those settings had a PT student too while I was there.
Typically how many patients did you seen in a day?
It would depend on the hospital census, typically 6-10.
Describe your schedule.
8 am – 4 pmish. Patients don’t have set appointment times. You see as many of your patients as you can before lunch and then as many as you can after lunch. You get about an hour for lunch while the patients have lunch. In this setting you have to be pretty flexible because patients could be gone for tests, refuse because they aren’t feeling well, or be having other treatments. When you are working on the ortho tower, you may work a little later depending on the number of surgeries scheduled for that day.
Is there a patient population you saw a lot of?
No I saw a little of everything (one of the reasons I ended up loving this clinical!).
Other things you had the opportunity to do besides seeing patients all day (example: observing surgeries or in services)
Yes, I got to spend half a day observing ortho surgeries then they became my patients until discharge. There were also 2 in-services during lunch that I got to attend.
Describe the facility (is there a rehab gym? does it have cool equipment? etc etc)
Its acute hospital so there is no rehab gym you work in the patient’s room and use the floor’s hallways.
Anything else you think another student would want to know about the site.
The hospital does have a psych ward and you do see some patients there. PTs don’t really do much wound care in acute here so if you wanted to do wound care, this may not be the clinical you are looking for (or you could be psyched like me if you don’t want to do wound care!). You can wear scrubs or khakis and polos. I went with scrubs because these patients could throw up or have a bladder/bowel accident and scrubs are easier to clean! You get free lunch every day at the hospital cafeteria. The cafeteria has a salad bar, a grill, sandwiches and salads, traditional cafeteria type food, and rotating specials (twice a week its Chick-Fil-A). You can park in the staff parking lots (they don’t have parking permits or tags) at the bottom of the hill and by the helipad or pay $2-3 dollars a day to park in the parking lots at the top of the hill across the street from the main hospital entrance.
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