I recently shared an educational post on social media about pressure-tolerant and pressure-intolerant areas of the residual limb. One of the comments caught me off guard and basically said that if a PT notices a skin issue on the residual limb, our only job should be to tell the patient to see their prosthetist. That’s it. We don't have the capacity or skill set to interpret what could be causing it.
I really don’t care about the comment itself. What caught my attention was the mindset behind it.
It’s crazy to me how territorial healthcare can get. As if understanding more about another profession somehow means you’re trying to step into their role.
I look at it the opposite way. The more I understand what the other people on the interdisciplinary team can do, the better I can use their expertise for my patient.
I spent most of my clinical career working closely alongside prosthetists, and over time we developed a much better understanding of what the other profession could and should be doing. We raised the expectations we had for each other and became better at our own jobs because of it. More importantly, our patients received a higher level of care, and we were able to get there more efficiently.
As a PT, I was usually seeing these patients several times a week, which gave me a lot more opportunity to notice when something was changing before it became a bigger problem. The prosthetist often wasn’t seeing them nearly as frequently, so being able to recognize a potential issue and clearly communicate what I was seeing was incredibly valuable.
That doesn’t mean I’m telling the prosthetist how to modify the socket. It means I can say, “Here’s what I’m seeing, here’s where it’s happening, here’s when it shows up, and here’s what I think might be contributing.”
Every prosthetist I worked closely with wanted that information.
And the more I understood what they could change, adjust, troubleshoot, and solve, the more useful that communication became. I could provide better information and have a much more productive conversation than simply saying, “Hey, the patient says their limb hurts.”
Sometimes I was right about what I thought was happening. Sometimes the prosthetist looked at it and gave me a completely different explanation. Great. Now I learned something too.
That’s what collaboration is supposed to look like.
And this goes way beyond PT and prosthetics. If we’re serious about interdisciplinary care, then understanding what the other professionals around us can do should make us better at caring for our patients, not blur the lines between our roles.
The more I understand another profession’s expertise, the better I can troubleshoot what I’m seeing, recognize when someone else needs to be brought in, and communicate what I’m actually asking them to help with.
And trust me, I have enough to do within my own scope. I’m not looking to do someone else's job too.
The whole point of understanding what the rest of the team does is almost the opposite. It makes me more efficient at my own job because I can recognize when somebody else has a better answer, a better tool, or can solve the problem much faster than I can.
Our patients really don’t care whose professional territory the solution came from. They care that we recognized the problem, communicated with each other, and helped them get to a better outcome.
We can respect each other’s scope without being protective of our knowledge.
The goal is still to take better care of the patient. Let's not forget that.