Welcome to the mobility minute podcast. This is our first episode of season 2 and we are super excited to kick off a new season with even more content on hospital patient mobility. We have an awesome lineup of clinicians, academics, and other key stakeholders dedicated to patient outcomes.

I am your host Drew Martin – but our focus today is on critical care physical therapy. Our guest Heidi Engel, PT, DPT has spent over 34 years in healthcare and has focused the last 11 years on ICU mobility. She leads physical therapy for a large academic healthcare center in San Francisco where she has been instrumental in establishing mobility initiatives. Heidi has published work regarding the ICU liberation campaign and A to F bundle. As you hear in the upcoming session, she is very keen on the physiological impacts of walking and shares her perspectives on humanizing a critically ill patient. Family engagement is extremely important to Heidi’s ICU, and she believes patient and family buy-in is essential to the execution of critical care mobility.

We get into all these topics and more during our conversation so let’s get right into it…

Welcome to another episode of the Mobility Minute Podcast - actually the 10th and final episode of Season 1. We've had some wonderful guests throughout the first season from traveling nurses to an ergonomics expert to a patient experiencing a blood clot and subsequent pulmonary embolism. We've covered a lot. Thank you to our listeners, guests, and those who may be listening for the first time. This podcast is a place for thoughtful discussion on patient mobility and how mobility factors into recovery.

Today, we speak with critical care nurse, Alison Cassina. In the ICU, mobility can fall down the priority list (and for good reason). Oftentimes bedside caregivers are unsure which direction to take when starting the rehabilitation journey for a patient. Critical care nurse, Alison Cassina knows this reality firsthand and has prioritized mobility for even the most acutely ill patients. She shares with us her team's approach to mobility with an ECMO patient who had to prove a certain standard of mobility before receiving a lung transplant.

All of this and more on the Mobility Minute Podcast!

Today we speak with Dr, Juliessa Pavon, MD.

Dr. Pavon is a researcher and associate professor at Duke University and is associated with the Durham V. A. for geriatrics. During our conversation, we get into the importance of mobility measurement, and some of Dr. Pavon’s research revolves around using accelerometer data to measure mobility in the hospital. And one of the key takeaways from our conversation really talks about objective data and the best way to use objective data in order to improve clinical practice. Just like many things in life, it is often hard to improve on something until you measure it. And that's something that Dr. Pavon’s research has really highlighted.