Working full time doing PT?

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moocaca

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From what I have been told it is pretty stressful working full time doing PT - there is a lot of paperwork to take home, so a full time work week ends up being more like 50-60hrs and that full time is more realistically 25-30 hrs a week (when outside work is taken into account). Is this the case? Until recently, I was very interested in doing physical therapy, but if I am going to have to work every day and then go home and do paperwork for hours, I'm not sure how realistic that will be for me. Any answers are greatly appreciated!

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From what I have been told it is pretty stressful working full time doing PT - there is a lot of paperwork to take home, so a full time work week ends up being more like 50-60hrs and that full time is more realistically 25-30 hrs a week (when outside work is taken into account). Is this the case? Until recently, I was very interested in doing physical therapy, but if I am going to have to work every day and then go home and do paperwork for hours, I'm not sure how realistic that will be for me. Any answers are greatly appreciated!


I work full time and almost never take paperwork home with me. I work in a rural hospital. 70% of my visits are OP orthopedics, the other 30% is made up off a mix of inpatients, home health, and nursing home evals. If you organize yourself there should be no problem getting done on time.
 
When I worked full-time, I almost always got my paperwork done before I went home, and if I didn't finish it that evening, I just did it when I got in the next morning. You learn to become very efficient, such as charting as you go during outpatient. Inpatient is very easy to complete in a timely fashion. SNF units, you have a lot of paper work, but you bill for the time you are writing up your evaluation and the time you spend with the patient. You do have a lot of weekly notes, but again, you bill for the time you are charting. The biggest hassle I found were places where you had to dictate your evaluations. You had to wait for the transcriptionist to finish, then go back and proofread their work, edit any errors and resubmit it. However, this did not put me anywhere close to working 50-60 hours because of paperwork. If you think that time management is going to be an issue, outpatient is the worst at getting behind because the schedule can be so variable with patients coming too early, too late, or whatever. SNF and acute care, you can see the patients in the order that you want or available. It's the not finding charts or having other medical personnel needing the patient over you, that can slow you down and affect your productivity. Inpatient rehab has a very set schedule, and the patients are almost always on time, and you have the most down time between exercises to do your paperwork. Bottom line, people choose physical therapy because they can help people, have a decent set number of hours, which pays decently, and have many opportunities for employment.
 
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