Complex Medical Conditions

This course offers students in their final year of the DPT program opportunities to think on their feet and reflect on actions after they encounter with simulated patients of different clinical domains and various clinical settings. The simulated patients are complex patients, who can be ambiguous, unpredictable and difficult to manage due to patient-related characteristics, e.g. comorbidities across multiple clinical domains, or contextual factors. Students are required to apply primarily the four types of clinical reasoning that they learn in the Clinical Case Management course (a concurrent course running in the same semester) while the simulated patient cases unfold in class. The four types of clinical reasoning are hypothetico-deductive reasoning, pattern recognition, collaborative reasoning and ethical reasoning. The lecture portion of the course will focus on the patient-client management for individuals with cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, with an emphasis on the complex post-surgical inpatient interventions including but not limited to LVAD, interventional cardiology, lung reduction for COPD, and lung/cardiac transplantation