Mentorship vs Internship

Welcome to Pelby biz podcast. I'm Dr. Kelly Alhui. I have grown and established brick and mortar practice in Northern Virginia called Ortho Pelvic Physical Therapy and also founded Pelvibiz, which is an online business consulting company that helps healthcare providers make more money and be healthy while doing it, especially in the pelvic health realm. And let's get into today's episode. Today I'm going to talk about mentorship, setting expectations for that, hiring on people, and just really being clear on what mentorship is. What I have found over the years is many therapists come out of school and they look at mentorship like an internship. Internship is different than mentorship. An internship is where you actually have a CI that your name is not on the caseload and you are helping your CI with patients. So, and that could be many different levels of helping. That could mean you only do the exercises. That means you help them with internal. That means you, um, have a little slight caseload yourself. There's different levels of, of an internship, right, Depending on how comfortable the CI is with you. And at the end of the day, typically what happens is they'll review your notes, they will give you tips and tricks on different things. They may even give you an assignment of, hey, I want you to go look up Ed and tell me three fun facts about Ed and, and bring it back, and you're going to present to the clinic, right? That is an internship. Now, once you leave school, that does not exist. Just so you know. Okay, that does not exist. Then there's something called a mentorship. A mentorship means that you actually have your own caseload. That means you actually have to see patients on your schedule. And I think a lot of new grads coming out of school and think that it's going to be like an internship where the other physical therapists are going to be helping you or someone's going to be approving your notes. And that's just not it. That is not it. So I just want to be very clear on the expectation when it comes to mentorship, when you're actually working and getting paid, a internship you are not technically getting paid for. More often than not, mentorship, typically you are actually working and getting paid. So there is a big, big difference. And to get paid, you actually have to see clients and you have to be willing to, you know, got to be comfortable. What I found is it takes about six months for you to actually get comfortable being in a new clinic. So especially in the pelvic health realm, because there's all these different diagnoses, potentially, that's coming in, and you're like, wow, I've never seen males, I've never seen transgender. I've never seen lichen sclerosis, I've never seen a tailbone pain. Like, all that stuff is new of stuff that they don't even teach you in school. And so all of that has to be taught through mentorship, through your clinic and. Or you can go to Con Ed classes, but even in six months, you can't take enough Con Ed to even understand the magnitude of how to treat complex chronic pelvic pain patients, all that kind of stuff. So when you. When you're looking, you know, for a job opportunity or even just, you know, a different place to work, mentorship really is guidance. And it's not. It's not delivered or shouldn't be delivered like a Con Ed class or like an internship. It's not like, hey, I'm going to provide mentorship for three weeks and then we're done with mentorship. That's not how it actually works. True mentorship is where you're having guidance throughout and you're collaborating with other colleagues. You're collaborating with maybe the master in, you know, the pelvic health world, you are collaborating with. You're actually doing your own research. You know, Google Scholar is a great resource for that to get free articles. You are, you know, just inquisitive and really into it and trying to understand more about how to help clients and trying to understand more about how to hit. Clients are a multifaceted approach and not just one way, which is a manual technique or the musculoskeletal approach or a nerve approach. There's so many different ways that you can approach all these conditions. And having a mentor, that means they're going to provide guidance in different forms. And maybe you're used to. And being able to lean on them to be like, yeah, okay, I could do this differently than this than I ever thought. Like, or even, like, show you how to do telehealth, like, all those things. That is mentorship. Even when. Let me also explain this. I think this is a very good thing to say. Even when your mentor is talking about marketing, sales, how to communicate to clients. That's the biggest thing that most of us struggle with, that you don't even know you struggle with. You think you need to go take another Con Ed class, but you actually have to learn how to listen and communicate to your clients and get them what they actually need. Because we have been taught Medically is only address the musculoskeletal thing. Well, here's the issue. If you have not addressed the underlying trauma or upregulated nervous system, how is the musculoskeletal system going to be addressed? You can't. The muscular skeletal system is a direct correlation what's happening with the nervous system, what's happening potentially with past trauma that's been had. So you have to be able to hit it from a multifaceted approach if you're trying to truly make an impact in the person's life and have that issue not come back to where it is, you know, right now. And so when I'm talking about mentorship, I think this is. I'm going to give you kind of a list of different things that I consider is mentorship and how to mentor people, because I know many, many clinicians that I have coached. They are also looking at it like an internship and say, like, week one, I'm gonna come in and treat all your patients with you. Week two, I'm going to then provide you with four hours of different manual techniques. Week three, I'm going to send you to a Con Ed class for a whole week. Week four, I'm going to have you shadow another therapist. Like, and so it's just like, oh, my gosh, now we are hand holding, and we've drawn out the mentorship for, like, three months. But the reality is, and you're also taking up a lot of time, you're taking up a lot of energy, and we just can't do that when you're actually working and having mentorship. So here's what I like to do, okay? I like to make videos on all diagnoses and put it in some library so that if anyone needs help, whatever I would say, or mentor or whoever is your mentor, they can help you with a video and talking it out through a video. I also have diagnosis charts on every single condition and how I'd progress them each week on what it takes for them to actually get to their goal. Also have telehealth charts. Okay. So some of my clinicians have struggled with telehealth, what to do, you know, with ED on a telehealth, okay, well, I can tell you what to do. And every single week, this is what, you know, we can progress. Yes, they have the right to treat however they want, but if they want guidance, then let's provide it for them. Right? Do you guys have an internal exercise library that shows, you know, we have over, I think, 600 exercises that show a wide variety of higher level exercises that are going to help every single condition and examples of why you would do this versus this. And do you have internal teaching where if you have multiple therapists on board, are they cross collaborating, are they cross shadowing or if the patient cancels, are they going to go help the other therapist out and see, you know, how they speak to people, how they communicate, what are they doing with the clients? That's huge. So co training with each other. If someone goes to a con ed class, then for us I have them come back and teach what they learned in that con ed class. Also, do you guys have, are you teaching on how to talk to clients and time management? I think time management is huge. We all want more time with our clients because we believe more time equals better outcomes. I believe that to an extent. I believe you can go overboard with that with, you know, a 90 minute eval and now you just overwhelm them and they're ready to go. Bye, bye. People want results in a shorter period of time, not a longer period of time. And we believe as therapists, oh, they have more of me, so that means more value. So I can charge more and I'm gonna get better results. And that's actually not the case. Case. It's actually the opposite. Have you, do you coach your, you know, therapist on mindset? Mindset shifting to become just basically a better communicator to be able to get better results. Do you review cases at team meetings if you have them? Do you have a channel where you're communicating with daily and being able to help the clinicians process what the person said in the treatment session and being able to talk it out, to be like, oh yeah, this is another path I could take that and then think of. So that way you have the best results possible. So to me, when you talk about mentorship in a clinic, it is a continuous thing. It is not like a one weekend course or a three month thing. It's a continuous progressive approach where you have resources that allow the clinician to grow when they need it, because you can't. If you were to dump every, all the information you possibly know on a clinician, they're only going to retain maybe 5% of that. So are we empowering clinicians to have resources out there that allow them to feel empowered and understand how to treat clients really effectively with maybe something they haven't thought about, you know, So I think that's huge. So I want to, I wanted this podcast to help redefine what mentorship is versus an internship. Because I'm seeing a lot of. I'm seeing kind of a lot of people coming out of school or just even people that have been out but maybe haven't been in the public health realm thinking that they're going to get an internship when mentorship is really being had and they're not fully understanding what mentorship is and how truly mentorship works. And so just clearly defining that. And even if you have. If you're a clinician and you have multiple providers in your clinic, have you clearly defined this? Because if you don't, people will become very resentful. People will be like, you told me you're gonna come in with me or whatever, and you just end up. Maybe you don't have time. Maybe you thought it was a different way. Maybe they took it as a different way. So really defining mentorship is very, very important. And I think overall will make everyone happier and make better clinicians out there when we truly mentor them and not just provide them with an internship while we're holding their hand and kind of walking them through it. You want the people to be able to see the patients. The best mentorship say this all the time. The best mentorship that you can possibly get is actually seeing a caseload of patients and seeing a multiple, two different diagnoses. And that is the best mentorship because the patient is actually teaching you. Let the patient teach you to. The patient will tell you, hey, this is what's happening. And then you'll start to see trends. Wow. Everyone with this diagnosis is saying this to me. Oh, my God, that's crazy. And you'll start to see that. And you only get that through experience and being at a clinic that has multiple cases that come through that are so different to be able to understand. Wow, we can. We can, you know, impact tailbone pain, but then we can also impact someone with a hysterectomy. But then we can impact someone that has pain with intercourse. Oh, wait, now we're stopping. Someone's with leakage. Now we're treating gender affirmation surgery. Now we are. I mean, there is such a multitude. Now we're treating constipation. Like, it is such a wide spectrum when it comes to the pelvic health world. And that's what's so cool about our field is, you know, I feel like you're never going to get bored because it's always gonna be something different walking in that door and trying to figure it out. And it's not typically normally straightforward. So that's the cool thing. So anyways, if you are looking, I mean, the other side of the coin to this is, you know, if you are looking for mentorship and really a lot of guidance, I'd be happy to, you know, talk with you if that's something you're looking for. I like to give mentorship a lot and, you know, help other clinicians be on top of their game and be the best at what we do. So if that's something you're looking for, let me know. You can always send me a DM on Instagram @ Pelvibiz. You can also just, you know, reach us@pelvibiz.com but yeah, if that's something you're looking for, let me know. But hopefully that helps clear up what the difference is mentorship versus an internship and what the expectation really is. So hopefully you guys have a great week. Bye guys. Thank you guys so much for listening to the podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Jane. 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