Physiotherapy

What is physiotherapy?

Physiotherapists help people affected by injury, illness or disability through movement and exercise, manual therapy, education and advice. They maintain health for people of all ages, helping patients to manage pain and prevent disease.

The profession helps to encourage development and facilitate recovery, enabling people to stay in work while helping them to remain independent for as long as possible. Physiotherapy is a science-based profession and takes a ‘whole person’ approach to health and wellbeing, which includes the patient’s general lifestyle.

At the core is the patient’s involvement in their own care, through education, awareness, empowerment and participation in their treatment.

You can benefit from physiotherapy at any time in your life. Physiotherapy helps with back pain or sudden injury, managing long-term medical conditions such as asthma and in preparing for childbirth or a sporting event.

The Physiotherapy Department at St. Michael’s Hospital has a team of 12 physiotherapists who work in a number of specialities

Services 

• Musculoskeletal outpatients
  • back pain, sports injuries, post-op orthopaedic surgery, post fracture e.g wrist or ankle, arthritis etc. Referrals are received from the hospital emergency department
• Inpatients
  • respiratory, care of the elderly, orthopaedics and neurology
• Pulmonary rehab
  • outpatient programmes/advice for those with respiratory conditions such as COPD
• COPD outreach
  • liaison between community and acute hospital for those with COPD
• Cardiac rehab – rehab for persons aged over 65 years.

There is an out of hours emergency respiratory on-call service available for inpatients at the following times:

Mon to Friday: 17.00 – 20.00
Sat/Sun:            08.00 – 20.00

Useful contact information

• Head of Department – Kari Christiansen
  • email: k.christiansen@stmichaels.ie