2013 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting: Health Professionals In the Spotlight

Q: Is the fact that your patients suffer from chronic conditions a frustrating side of the job? Does that ever get to you?

A: Of course it does, because you spend your day trying to help people feel better, and sometimes you hit a wall. Sometimes you need to work with your other healthcare team members to see if there’s something that can get [the patient] past that little bump in the road, and that’s why a healthcare team approach is so important with these people—because you can never do it alone. You need to rely on your physician, nurse, psychologist, and the occupational therapist, people who work as a team to help manage these patients. You need them.

Q: How much have you seen the evolution of care change from the physical therapy perspective?

A: When I first started, we were dealing with a lot with people who already had a lot of malformations and disabilities. And now the biologic drugs have created a situation where we’re not dealing with a lot of people who have those. What we do in therapy now is help teach them to manage their symptoms. We also work on overall general strengthening and conditioning with these folks, because they don’t need us to teach them how to use a walker or cane or push a wheelchair anymore, because the biologic drugs have made it so much better for them. It’s vastly changed with the biologic drugs.

Q: How satisfying is that change?

A: It’s such joy for me knowing that I’m not going to see them in 20 years and they’re going to have malformed fingers, inability to walk, or that they’re going to have hip replacement, knee replacement, because that doesn’t necessarily happen anymore. It’s a really interesting time to be in rheumatology.

Dr. Mintz

ARHP Addie Thomas Service Award

Sandra Mintz, RN, BSN

Division of Rheumatology, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

Background: Mintz joined Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) in 1995, and for the past 12 years has worked as nurse case manager for the Pediatric Rheumatology CORE at CHLA. She has served on a number of ARHP and ACR committees, and currently is a member of the ACR Committee of Education, the ARHP Executive Committee, and is invited guest to the ACR/ARHP Annual Scientific Meeting Planning Committee.

Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1997, Mintz uses her own personal battles with autoimmune disease to relate to patients and their caregivers. “Many of my patients are learning to take injections for the first time and are very anxious,” she says. “I can talk to them about the fact I have been self-injecting for 15 years now. I tell them that I have stayed on top of it, have done my follow-up, and have learned a lot of techniques that make the process easier.”