Early Intervention Physical Therapy: Decreasing Gross Motor Gap in Delayed Children

Presenter: Sophia Russo, Kinesiology, Global Public Health Scholars

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For my practicum I worked closely with early intervention physical therapists though an organization called Liberty Post Resources in Syracuse, New York. The mission of Liberty Post is to provide therapies and resources to children between the ages of birth to age five who have a disability or are developmentally delayed in some way. The therapies offered include physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and special education. For my practicum I chose to work with five different physical therapists over the span of two to three weeks in order to learn more about early intervention physical therapy and how they are able to help delayed children catch up with those their age and meet the proper developmental milestones. With Liberty Post I was able to travel to the patients homes and provide at home care. This is much more beneficial to the child because they are in a comfortable environment as well as parents are present for the session and can learn exercises they can do with their child even when the therapists are not there. My specific responsibilities included assisting the physical therapists with different activities and exercises for the children. While some kids were very shy and I had to take a more passive role in their sessions, others were incredibly excited and ready to do their exercises. Once I had been working with the therapists for a few weeks they began to give me more responsibilities such as coming up with exercises I think would be beneficial for the children and then allowing me to run some of the therapy sessions. I learned so much through this experience, at the beginning it mostly looked like they were playing with the children but as time progressed I began to realize what each exercise did and even if it looked like play they were trying to activate and use different muscles to increase the child's strength.Overall, early intervention physical therapy is very important to public health. This is because the patients have a variety of different disorders and diseases so interacting with different families and children has given me insight into what they suffer from and learn more about how they live their lives and manage disability. More specifically, home visits helped me to examine children and their parents and siblings to fully see how their disability impacts their family life and dynamics. Moreover, seeing how the environment a child is raised in and lives in contributes to their progression and improvement in physical therapy is important to global health.