How do you help patients stay motivated and engaged during their rehabilitation process?

Question

Emily Hill, DPT · Answer

My name is Emily. I'm a physical therapist. I'm going to answer this from a slightly different position because I do work with a lot of chronic pain, chronic illness, and our clinic particularly serves a large portion of our homeless community. So how do I keep them motivated and engaged, especially when they've had pain for many years? I take the time to get to know my patient and really tailor their treatment plan toward their personal goals and things that they find valuable. I also spend a large amount of time in between exercises explaining why they need to do their exercises in terms that I know they'll understand. I'm not going to use textbook terms because I do realize that not everybody goes to school for physical therapy or athletic training. They're not going to understand the anatomical terms or scientific terms. So creating an environment where I'm educating them on this activity is going to help you for this reason and for them in particular. Like for a specific activity that they want to get back to doing or that they want to have less pain while they're doing. And then I just spend extra time each session, especially at the beginning and the end, explaining to them why it's important that they continue their plan of care even after they discharge from physical therapy. You know, sometimes I'm really straightforward and say if you're not willing to work in physical therapy, physical therapy might not work for you because that is the physical aspect of it. You are required to do a certain amount, a certain amount of movement with your body for it to help you.

Jen Dieter · Answer

The question is, how do you help patients stay motivated and engaged during their rehab process? I would say one of the most important things is to make it fun, right? I mean, people don't really want to come see me. They don't want to be doing physical therapy. They don't want to be doing rehab. They're there because they're in pain. So I feel like it's important to try to keep it a little bit fun for patients in some way, keep them engaged in conversation, ask them questions about their process, and try to help point out the good things. So sometimes people think, oh, it's hurting. It's still hurting, but they don't realize their range of motion is getting better or their squat technique may be getting better or any of these little things along the way that can be helpful. I think it's important to point that out so that they can stay connected to the rehab process and stay motivated along the way.

Kate Edwards, PT, DPT, OCS · Answer

Hey everyone, Kate Edwards here. The question I'm answering is how do you help patients stay motivated and engaged during their rehabilitation process? And I would say in the beginning of our time together, we set goals together. And so as we're going through and they're improving, we go back and we look at those goals and we look at, you know, where we were when they first came in to where they are now. And a lot of times you'll forget when you start to feel better about the things that you couldn't do. So it's not uncommon for one of my runners to, you know, not be able to walk or maybe only be able to run a mile when they come in and then they're training for a half marathon and they're at 10 miles, almost pain-free, and they're kind of frustrated that they're not at that 13 miles pain-free. So it's really helpful when we can say, hey, do you remember that you couldn't walk before? And I will even sometimes go back in their chart and read back to them the things that they've said. So I think that that helps, but them being involved in the care and helping make decisions and having timelines, I think all of that really, really helps with the rehab process.

Dr. Brian Cunningham · Answer

How do I help patients stay motivated and engaged during rehabilitation? One trick that I often use is really understanding their why. Why are they here for physical therapy? Why do they want to get better? What's the real reason about it? Why do they want to be out of pain? Is it because they are fearful of losing their job or that they are fearful that they're aging too quick? Whatever that why is, you have to get down to the actual why and what's the fear that they're going to overcome or is it what pleasure they're going to be able to get from achieving their goal or getting out of pain. Basically people are motivated by pain or pleasure, right? Moving away from pain or moving towards pleasure. So you have to figure out intrinsically what motivates them.

Jim Heafner · Answer

I help patients stay motivated and engaged during the rehab process by really following two principles that I try to live by my whole life, which is one, life is not a one-size-fits-all package for everybody. So when someone comes in and something's not working that maybe worked for someone else, I don't get discouraged or I don't let the negative thoughts come in then because I am already thinking about, okay, how can I pivot to make the treatment better for that individual or how can I do something different because I know what works for somebody might not work for somebody else when it comes to managing pain. And then the second thing that I do to really stay motivated and engaged with people is to practice what I preach. So I'm doing repetitions with them. I'm on the ground sort of showing them how to do things and that act of being excited about it, I hope that it sort of stimulates excitement and motivation and happiness and a desire to get better for the patient. So those two principles.

Lisa Pataky, PT, DPT, SCS, CSCS · Answer

How do you help patients stay motivated and engaged during the rehabilitation process? I think that the more that you can involve them in the process, the more they'll stay motivated and engaged. They should be the primary people setting goals, and so the more that you can relate what you're doing back to their goals, the more they're going to stay engaged. And then if you can just do little things that gives them some ownership and self-efficacy throughout the process, I think that helps a lot. There's a lot of studies that show even letting your patient or athlete pick the color of the ball that you're going to use for an exercise can help them stay motivated. Or they can choose the order of the exercises, or you give them three exercises that all achieve the same purpose and they can pick the one that they like the most. Little things like that, where they feel like they have a say and they're making choices, can go a really long way with your patients or athletes staying engaged during the process. And it can be tough, so I think that setting short-term achievable goals can be really important as well, because if you're just looking at a nine-month-long rehab and you're only looking at the end goal, it's really hard to stay motivated when it seems so far away. So setting short-term achievable things can be really helpful as well.

Swimming

Strength

Triathlon

Photography

Track & Field

Nutrition

Physical Therapy

Running

Pets

Cycling

Podcasting

HealthCare

Musculoskeletal

Hockey

First Responders

Integrative Medicine

Chiropractic

Cross Country Skiing

Adaptive Sports

Climbing

Mental Health

Surfing

Tennis

Military

Mind Body

Scholars

Criminal Justice

Liquor

CrossFit

Golf

Soccer

Pickleball

Hunting

Public Speaking

Venture Capital

"How do you help patients stay motivated and engaged during their rehabilitation process?"