Podcast | Episode 18: Institute of Higher Learning (IHL)

Podcast Episode

 

Podcast Transcript

Tracy Davis: Welcome to the Brooks Rehabilitation Podcast. My name is Tracy Davis. On this episode, we are going to be talking about the Brooks Institute for Higher Learning or Brooks IHL for short with Dr. Robert Rowe and Dr. Trent Harrison. Thanks for listening to the podcast. I want to remind you to go to BrooksRehab.org to learn more about our entire organization, everything that we have going on. We’ve got a lot of exciting things happening here at Brooks, and also find us on all social media platforms @brooksrehab. We’ll keep it really brief this time, and we’re going to get right into the episode. Well, let’s just start off by having you guys introduce yourself.

Bob Rowe: Hi, I’m Dr. Bob Rowe. I’m the executive director of the Brooks Institute of Higher Learning.

Trent Harrison: I’m Dr. Trent Harrison. I am the orthopedic manual fellowship coordinator and the orthopedic residency coordinator for the IHL.

Tracy Davis: Great. So before we go into a little bit of your histories, how long have you guys both been in Brooks?

Bob Rowe: I’ve been here almost 16 years.

Tracy Davis: Has it been that long? Wow.

Bob Rowe: Yeah.

Trent Harrison: I’ve been here 10 years with a one… I guess I’ve been here 11 years but there was a gap year in between.

Tracy Davis: That’s right.

Trent Harrison: So it’s kind of broken up into five years.

Tracy Davis: You were traveling now with years.

Bob Rowe: He’s the prodigal son.

Tracy Davis: He came back.

Bob Rowe: He came back.

Tracy Davis: That’s right.

Trent Harrison: I was prophesied to return.

Tracy Davis: Yeah, that’s right. I forgot about that. So just tell me, Bob, tell me a little bit about your history and how you got into this field and what led you to being at Brooks?

Bob Rowe: Yeah. Well, it’s a long story because I’m an old, old man, but grew up in New York, started college, moved to Louisiana, did my professional training, PT school at LSU Health Science Center in New Orleans, Go Tigers, and then lived in Louisiana for 25 years and Katrina hit. My family and I decided, we needed to find another place to live, and we landed in Brooks and it’s a great story. So we’ve been here and really happy and enjoyed our time here at Brooks. So here we are.

Tracy Davis: Trent.

Trent Harrison: Yeah, so I went to the University of St. Augustine. So when I did my DPT training, I was right down the road and not to give him a big head, but I came here because Bob was here. Not to segue too much into the topic today, but when I was graduating PT program, I knew I wanted do a residency training mainly because of the environment that I was in. In PT school, I just saw what fellows and residents did because how they interacted with my instructors. I would hear their conversations and say, “I have no idea what they’re talking about, so I need to get me some of that.” When I spoke with one of my instructors, they said, “You probably need to go to Brooks and you probably need to go work with Bob.” So that’s when I interviewed and I did the residency program at Brooks and the rest is history.

Tracy Davis: So you came here into the residency program.

Trent Harrison: I came here specifically for the… I didn’t care where I was going to live and work because I just wanted to get employed so I could be a part of the program. So I was actually living at the beach because that’s where my fiance had a house. I was working in Fleming Island and I was all about the keys. I was all about it because for me it was, I’m here for this experience. I don’t care where I work and live. It’s all good.

Tracy Davis: For those that don’t know, that’s a very long drive. Fleming Island to the beach is yeah, that’s a very long drive.

Trent Harrison: There’s a lot of driving in Jacksonville in general, and that’s already went the other end.

Tracy Davis: So Bob, 16 years ago whenever you came in, wasn’t it just called like a clinical education program that we had at Brooks? It wasn’t anything, we had something, but it wasn’t huge, or what did we have whenever you first came?

Bob Rowe: So the great thing and why I chose to come here because, without going into too much detail, when I decided to leave LSU, I did a national search and I had job offers from a couple of top five academic programs. That’s really where I thought I was going to go was to another academic program. I was in a core faculty position at LSU actually at the time when I was leaving. I was going to go to another academic program and Brooks is obviously not an academic program. But the thing that attracted me was that Brooks had zero. It was a blank canvas. I had my interview with Michael Spigel, and it was clear that there was a great vision and there were resources. It was obvious that there was going to be a lot of opportunity for me to create something that was unique. So that was what drew me here was the opportunity to create something.

Tracy Davis: So we really didn’t have anything at the time.

Bob Rowe: It was nothing.

Tracy Davis: Because you would have preceded my time here, so that’s why I couldn’t quite remember. Okay, so that’s great. I mean, that seems like a perfect opportunity and something you wanted to grow yourself.

Bob Rowe: Yep.

Tracy Davis: Absolutely.

Trent Harrison: Blank canvas with the underlying culture needed to build on.

Tracy Davis: Right. Yeah, and infrastructure of an organization already there and stuff like that. Okay. Fantastic. So can we just get into a little bit of what’s a PT, OT residency and fellowship program for people that don’t know. I guess a lot of people probably think you just go to school, get your degree, yay, go work. So why do we have you? What do you guys do?

Bob Rowe: Both PT and OT, you go to undergraduate school and then you finish undergraduate, so four years of college. Then you go to professional school for OT. They’re in transition, so you either go to a master’s program or go to an OTD program. For PT now, it’s a hundred percent you go to undergraduate and then you move on to a DPT program, so another two to three years of professional school and graduate with a DPT. So then you graduate, and if you choose to do a residency, it’s optional. Again, it’s a clinical advanced training over and above what you receive from your DPT.

Tracy Davis: Right. Okay. So these are the people that are wanting to go above and beyond in their career field to learn more.

Bob Rowe: Correct.

Tracy Davis: So what kind of things are they getting after school?

Trent Harrison: I think another way of putting it also is it’s not just going above and beyond and want to learn more, there’s some of that. But I think some of it also is you’re wanting to refine what you just learned in DPT program for the thing you’re actually wanting to do. Because when you think about somebody to graduate DPT program, they’re getting everything. They’re getting the gamut, little bit of peds, little bit of ortho, a little bit of neuro, a little bit all these things, and then you graduate and then you go into, this is the job I want. Maybe I need to understand it to a degree, but I don’t think I’d be practicing with 30% of what I just learned from DPT school.

So now I need to actually put a spotlight on that. Now I need to actually say that 30% means a lot more to me. So how do I refine it? How do I actually process a little bit more, and how do I build onto it some? And that’s in essence of what I thought of when I was in a residency program, is that was the goal. It’s like I knew I wasn’t going to do these things. This is what I wanted, so now let’s try and enhance that and make sure that I really do understand it as well as I hope to graduating from PT school.

Tracy Davis: So to get a little more micro, what are the things that people are doing whenever they join the residency program? Whenever they start, they sign up, I’m sure they go through a process to be approved to join the program, stuff like that, what are they getting as they start?

Bob Rowe: So going just tailed, tacking onto what Trent was talking about, all the residencies are broken into areas of specialty. So they’ll go into orthopedics or neurologic or pediatrics or geriatrics or sports. So they’re looking to get that additional training in that very specific area where they really want to go practice where they really want to go work. So they’re learning the additional knowledge, they’re learning additional hands on skills, they’re learning how to better communicate with patients, they’re learning how to develop relationships with patients, they’re learning how to take the information that they learned in their either OTD program or their DPT program and how to better integrate that and use that information with patients. So those are the nuts and bolts of the residency.

Tracy Davis: And then that’s, I guess that’s another kind of like what we said before with having Brooks is we have all of these different sites across our entire system of care so that all these therapists can go to those places and get that training, geriatric sports, neuro, all those kind of things.

Trent Harrison: Yeah. We’ve got all the populations available to us. So we just match the populations with the actual specialty area you’re trying to train in, and then you can actually get that exposure because that’s one of the big things, is that I think that a lot of people have, and I don’t want to say misconception, but in essence and misconception that some people associate. Oh, I want to do a residency because I want to be a specialist. So the goal is to get this specialty certificate at the end of the, like you sit down for a test, which is available out there and, oh, I want to get through the residency so I can have this specialty exam that I then complete. And then I finally have these specialty letters after my name, which is awesome.

Yes, it’s great to have, but you technically don’t have to do a residency program to get those specialty. You could just go out and practice for X amount of years, and then afterwards, you could sit down and take that test if you studied for it. So the test itself might not be a true reflection of the exposure in the sort of practice that you’ve actually had, right? Because maybe you’ve been practicing for eight years and a small percentage that has been orthopedics, but over those eight years, it’s now enough to sit for this exam. That’s a little different than, you know what? I want to drink from the fire hose. I want to do a residency program where the only thing I’m doing is specifically the thing that I want to get good at. It’s like an apprenticeship of old.

It’s like in the olden days, you want to be the blacksmith. You went and you worked with the blacksmith, and they taught you everything they knew, right? I think that’s what was so appealing to me in terms of residency training is. It was yeah, I could do this on my own maybe over time, but I want to go work with the blacksmith. I want to go sit there and sweat in the forge and actually see what they’re doing. So to me that was part of that residency program. It was literally someone saying, “Oh, try this. Oh now, try it this way. Now, do it this way. Now, what did you see?” And then being able to reflect with you, and you’re constantly in that environment that you needed in order to get those reps in.

Tracy Davis: Right. Sure.

Bob Rowe: So talking the residents take classes, and they practice and there’s lots of different activities they do, and they take tests. But we always talk about the backbone of residency training is the mentoring where they receive mentoring from a clinical expert that’s already been through that before. And that’s really what we always think of as the key, and that’s what Trent was kind of alluding to that this, go spend time with blacksmith. I was in the clinic this morning, performing, mentoring, and I think you were in…

Trent Harrison: I was, yeah.

Bob Rowe: Yeah. Trent was in the clinic this morning, too. So we go into clinic and we spend time with people who were in the program, residency, or fellowship, and we observe them and have conversations with them and challenge them and give them suggestions and answer their questions and ask them questions. It’s a very high level of accountability and challenging them in terms of their integration, because we know what they’re learning. As faculty, we know what they know and what they should know and what they should be doing. So we’re looking over their shoulder and assessing are they doing what they’re supposed to be doing. That’s consistent with other residency programs and healthcare, whether it’s physicians or pharmacists, all the different programs.

Tracy Davis: Absolutely.

Trent Harrison: But I think is also amazing about just because we’re talking about the mentoring at the moment that I want to highlight is there is definitely a level of accountability there in terms of yes, the mentor knows what the resident needs to be doing and how they need to be doing it potentially, right? So they’re there in that sense. But I don’t want people to think hearing that that it’s like, especially for those of you who are in DPT program, that it is a yearlong practical. Those mentoring sessions are not judgment hours, and it’s not that you have as teacher there. A mentor’s very different than a teacher-student relationship. A teacher-student relationship sometimes is very much one directional.

Tracy Davis: Right. Yeah. This is more like just making sure you’re on the path if you kind of stray off a little bump back to the road kind of thing.

Trent Harrison: Yeah, and it’s very collegial. It’s very guiding. It’s very, let’s talk about it. And if you’re wrong, that’s great. Let’s talk about why that maybe you were wrong or maybe I’m wrong. And let’s talk about why I was wrong because there’s information, there’s ways. You’re going to learn so much about figuring out how I was wrong or why you were wrong as opposed to it’s just this binary, I got to have the right answer, I got to have the wrong answer, which kind of happens sometimes in a teacher-student relationship. So you got to wash that out. You got to make sure that’s gone during this residency process and during the mentoring process. Because the mentoring process, I think is the most rewarding thing once people understand that and their vulnerabilities are down and those kind of things, and you’re just open and that’s on the mentor. The mentor’s going to be, they’re coached in that sort of, they’re trained in that process to be able to help bring those walls down.

And those relationships, I mean, the people that I had as mentors when I was going through the program, I still have wonderfully strong relationships with those individuals, and I still get mentorship from them to this day. I think that’s just such a like a beautiful part of going through the residency program is building those relationships.

Tracy Davis: So let’s talk a little bit about the benefit of, and why would someone want to come to do the residency through the Brooks IHL. What are they? We should say too that they are a working employee, right? They’re working here. They’re not just an intern. We do have interns around the company, but these are not interns. So kind of explain some of those things and why people should be drawn to come to Brooks IHL.

Trent Harrison: Me? Oh yeah, I’ll go for it. So yeah, like you alluded to, Tracy, it’s a hundred percent that you have to wear two hats while you’re here as a resident in the Brooks system because you are both a resident, meaning that there are responsibilities that you have within the IHL here at Brooks, but then you’re also a full employee with full benefits. So you’re actually wearing that employee hat, so you got to wear both. So that means you’re managing a couple different relationships. You’re managing the relationships with your actual site and your manager in that sense and you’re managing relationship with your cohort, the people you’re learning with, and your coordinator, whoever it is, that’s actually running your program, but that’s an aside sort of… What was the question again?

Tracy Davis: No, just the benefits of why someone would want to come to the IHL. So that’s one thing. You are an employee while you are getting your education going through your residency.

Trent Harrison: No, a hundred percent. So I would say, to me, I think the biggest benefit probably by far that what I’ve seen. In my role as residency coordinator over the years, what I’ve found is one of the strengths of our program versus other programs. I’ve also, not tooting my horn, but I’ve been able to be a part of credentialing processes to go see other residency programs. So I’ve been able to go over and see other residency programs, which has been wonderful because sometimes they do things that are great and you’re like, “Oh, that’s great.” You’re going to add that, and you get to talk to other coordinators. But I think the thing that sort of stood out always for Brooks was that it’s boots on the ground here. You have all these different residency programs and every residency program has X amount of residents in them, and all those residents start at the same time. So we’ll bring on 30 plus residents and fellows to start a cohort year together.

Tracy Davis: Right, and it’s not rolling throughout the year. They all start together like the semester started all together.

Trent Harrison: Exactly. So you have that sort of that collegial vibe and all of them get to build relationships. So you’re building relationships, not only with your cohort. In the orthopedic residency, we have somewhere between six and eight residents, and they build super strong relationships with the other people there. They’re going to be able to benefit from each other’s strengths and weaknesses, because someone has… It’s almost like you get five times the mentoring, because if you go out and you have your mentoring relationship with your mentor, well, you’re going to work on the things that you need to work on.

Well, meanwhile, they’re working on different things potentially with this other resident, and then you’re talking to that resident and you’re learning from their experiences. So there’s this whole sort of shared learning experience that you’re going to have with your cohort members. On top of that, there are other residency programs simultaneously going on in different specialties and you’re going to be able to pick their brain. So I think that cultural aspect at Brooks, the big culture where it’s this sort of filter down, you have the big Brooks rehab umbrella culture that we already have. That’s very strong, and then you have the IHL culture, and then you have the culture within your sort of residency program, and you get the benefit of all of those because you’re here in person, boots on the ground sort of in this program.

I think that’s something that it’s hard to replicate that. This is definitely a unique scenario because at other facilities or other institutions or other areas, it would be hard to do because that’s hard to replicate in general. Budgetary wise, being able to manage that, there’s all sorts of things that we’ve been blessed at Brooks that everyone understood the mission and understood the goal, and they were able to make it happen. So that we can now have this microcosm, and being able to be a part of that microcosm is I think the biggest strength.

Tracy Davis: Culture is very hard to build from nowhere.

Bob Rowe: And it’s been intentional, and I’ll add a couple more things to what Trent was talking about that in terms of the function of the IHL, everything works synergistically. Again, it’s very intentional in how it was built and how it was constructed. So the continuing ed program that we have, and the student internship program we have, and the residency program we have, all of those intertwine together. So they all interact, and they all engage each other, and they all support each other. So they’re synergistic and again, that’s very intentional.

Trent talked about the engagement between the different programs. Well, each one of the specialty residency programs has… So it might be a women’s health residency, but it requires a little bit of training within orthopedics and manual therapy. Well, guess what? We have an orthopedic residency and we have a manual therapy fellowship. So we have the opportunity to shift some things over from these experts in manual therapy to do some training over there. The pediatrics residency requires some training from orthopedics. So again, we can shift some things over there.

Tracy Davis: Right. All without having to leave Brooks.

Bob Rowe: Correct. And geriatrics is this hodgepodge of neurologics, and orthopedics, and cardiovascular. So again, we can leverage all of these programs simultaneously and shift things back and forth, shift knowledge, and translate it back and forth between all the different groups. Again, you said it without ever having to leave Brooks. I mean, all within the family, within this community that we have developed here.

Tracy Davis: Absolutely.

Trent Harrison: Yeah. It takes years sometimes for people years to build that Rolodex, right? You go out and you become a practicing clinician, physical therapist somewhere, and you’ve got your outpatient clinic. It’s going to take years to build like, okay, now, I finally know a personal trainer I really like. Now, I finally know a nutrition I like. Now, I finally know a… et cetera. You’re going to have a full Rolodex after the residency, just because we’ll have guest lecturers come in. You have the other specialty areas obviously, so it’s like you leave and you’re like, “All right. I went through this with my buddy, Jeff. He’s a neuro guy. So now I can call him if I have an issue. I can call so and so.”

Tracy Davis: Connection too.

Trent Harrison: Yeah, you have an instant catalog in Rolodex.

Tracy Davis: So much a life is about connections and who you know and yeah, absolutely.

Bob Rowe: The other strength is that just within Brooks, going outside the IHL, we have so many strong programs. We have the adaptive sports program, and we have the NRC, and we have the clubhouse and we have so many, I mean, many, many, many more. That again, we use and we engage with, and we interact with that add to the residency experience, and that other programs around the country don’t have anything close to what we have here.

Tracy Davis: I was going to ask that like what really stands out just really quickly that makes the Brooks IHL so much different. Is it the system of Brooks of what they have access to here? I mean, obviously the culture and all the mentorship and stuff you guys already mentioned, but that’s got to be a big factor.

Bob Rowe: It is, you’re absolutely correct.

Tracy Davis: Okay. Yeah, I couldn’t imagine, and I think about that a lot as I’m learning more about other rehabilitation healthcare systems that just how unique we are. It’s a theme that we don’t try to bring up all in every podcast, but it’s a theme that always works its way up somehow, because it always gets talked about. I know I work in marketing, but it gets talked about a lot that just naturally that we are very different of what we have here in Jacksonville and throughout Florida.

Trent Harrison: And I’ll just throw this out there because we’ve talked about residency and mentorship thus far. I think that obviously this is the Brooks podcast, so of course, we’re going to market Brooks and it’s important. But I’d like to just throw out there for anyone who’s listening at this point in time, because you tuned in, because you were like, “Oh, I don’t know enough about residencies,” and that’s the hopefully part of the intent of this is to describe residencies in general.

But when someone comes up to me at CSM at the conferences and they say, “Oh, I’m curious about residencies, and it’s sort of this general take on residencies.” One of the things I’ll say and this is going back to that mentoring, I’ll tell them figure out who the mentor is at whatever program you’re going to go to. Who’s the mentor, right? And then ask like figure out what’s that mentor’s communications style, talk to them, call them up, or email them. Do you have the same kind of communications style? Do you feel comfortable talking to this person? And then how do they practice? What’s their practice pattern, if you could figure it out, and does that practice pattern mirror what you kind of want to do?

Because I think that mentorship and that relationship is so crucial to the process of doing a residency. I think that there’s a lot of people that maybe focus on the didactic like, oh, I’m going to learn a bunch of stuff. You can learn a bunch of stuff. You can learn things now in the technological age. You can learn this stuff. But it’s how you actually communicate into that relationship you have with that mentor so that they can help you figure out what stuff of that you’re learning is actually relevant. And what stuff of that is like, you don’t need that yet or which one of these is most important or how are you processing that information. So it’s just on the side.

Tracy Davis: I mean, for me, everything I know about photo, video, and podcasts, everything that I do here at Brooks, I’m self-taught through YouTube and whatever, so I have a YouTube degree. But I have purchased courses that, because whenever it comes to YouTube, whether it’s how to install your microwave or whatever, you have no idea, the actual knowledge base of the person that’s on the video, and you have no clue. But it’s nice to actually I’ve taken classes and bought courses and whatnot where it’s a singular professional that has a long track record of this is what they are good at. I learned so much more because I don’t have to weed through everything on YouTube of, that doesn’t sound right, or I tried that and it failed. You know what I mean?

Trent Harrison: Right. I need to buy a new microwave.

Tracy Davis: Yeah. Distill it all down so it makes total sense. As we’re running out of time a little bit, what’s the difference in a residency and fellowship?

Bob Rowe: So the residency is the first level. So after somebody graduated from the professional level that we talked about, the natural progression would be going into residency. I need to clarify, that’s true for, I’m going to talk about PTs first. So the first level is residency, and then after you complete residency, you might potentially move into a higher level, more advanced subspecialty into fellowship. For OTs, just a difference in nomenclature. Their first level is called fellowship.

Tracy Davis: Okay. I did not know that.

Bob Rowe: Yeah. So it’s just a difference in how the different professional organizations name things.

Tracy Davis: Okay. So why would somebody, let’s say a physical therapist, after they’re done with the residency, why would they want to become a fellow?

Bob Rowe: It’s again, just…

Tracy Davis: Same Stuff.

Bob Rowe: To be honest, it’s a very altruistic pathway that because really, at the end of the day, you don’t really make much more money.

Tracy Davis: Right.

Bob Rowe: And you don’t get a lot of accolades. You don’t get a lot. What you get is the feeling and the knowledge that you’re going to do a better job with the patients that you see every day.

Tracy Davis: So it’s purely for the love of the game.

Bob Rowe: Yeah, because the people that you see, you’re going to see patients, that’s what we are with clinicians, and whether you’re an OT or a PT, you’re going to see patients. And those patients that you see, you’re going to do a better job with, and that’s what it’s all about. That’s what residency and fellowship training is all about.

Tracy Davis: If it’s your career, why not get the most knowledge you can possibly get?

Bob Rowe: And clearly, people who have completed residency and fellowship do a better job than people who haven’t got residency and fellowship.

Tracy Davis: Absolutely. That’s great. So what is the application process of someone is wanting to join the Brooks IHL? How do they stand out? How competitive is it? How does all that work?

Bob Rowe: So logistically, it’s an electronic portal. It’s called Residency Fellowship PTCAS, it’s RF-PTCAS. It’s an electronic portal. You can find it through our website and through the IHL, through the Brooks IHL. It opens October 1st, and it’s a national portal, so it’s not just our portal. It’s a national residency fellowship portal. So that’s how you would get into it. That’s how you would apply to the residency. In terms of specifically what we look for-

Trent Harrison: That’s a loaded question. That’s a tough one.

Bob Rowe: Yeah, do you want to go first?

Trent Harrison: Well, I’ll just say it’s a tough one because I’d love to give a blueprint. But that blueprint not necessarily going to, I mean that someone automatically gets into the program, because every year, we joke a lot about those of us who are in the coordinator roles now who maybe did the residency program 10 years ago. We joke now that I don’t think I could have gotten into the program. It’s a steep competition. I think that there are some people that they are accomplishing a lot during their student years. I mean, they’re on national organizations, they’re on boards, they’re volunteering for things all the time. And that’s not to say that you need those things, but I think that the bottom line is that’s demonstrating a level of passion. That’s demonstrating a level of passion towards that profession already. So I don’t know if you want to touch on anything specific.

Bob Rowe: Yeah. I mean, I feel very strongly that the-

Trent Harrison: That I would not have gotten into the program.

Bob Rowe: No. Trent, absolutely would’ve gotten into the program today. He would get into the program today. I still remember Trent coming to my office, pre-interview. He scheduled an appointment with me while he was a student at USA. I still remember that meeting when he came and sat in my office and just introduced himself and chatted with me, and it was a great meeting. So I still remember that.

Trent Harrison: I think that’s important though. That’s an important thing to put out there for people that are applying to any program is that physical touch points. Like you said before, relationships matter, right? And I think that showing your passion, one, through what you’ve done, and then two, by how you actually try to connect with that program. I think all of that really matters, and it really demonstrates how much you want it and how much you want to bring to it and how much you want the profession as a whole, not just that residency program, but how much you actually want to live and breathe this profession. I think that can be demonstrated through those applications too.

Bob Rowe: So I’m going to take a step back and you asked earlier, what are some advantages of the Brooks IHL residency programs? And one is that we don’t charge tuition and we don’t decrease salaries. So out of 350 programs in the country, we’re probably the only one that doesn’t do that.

Tracy Davis: Oh, wow.

Bob Rowe: So everybody else in all 350 other programs as best I can tell either charges some kind of tuition or there’s a decrease in salary associated with this. And just based on math, it cost us about $40,000 a resident to educate people. So it’s a huge dedication and our resources to train people, and then there’s no commitment afterwards. We don’t ask people to sign up and say, “Hey, you’re going to work for a year or five years or whatever.” So people finish with residency and they can walk away.

So we take that very seriously. We want people to come in who have passion. As Trent said, we want people who are going to be dedicated clinical leaders, who are going to go do great things, who are going to change the world. I mean, we’re going to invest that money in people. We want people who are going to go do great things, and that’s what we’re looking for. So when we look at the applications, when we look at the material the people are submitting, that’s what we’re trying to glean out. We’re trying to figure out who are the people who are going to change the world, and those are the ones who we select.

Tracy Davis: Yeah. I mean, if you’re going to bring someone on, and you’re going to provide them all of the things you just said, and then our whole system and all the things that also come along with being a Brooks employee and whatnot, yeah, you would want to be pretty particular and make sure that these are people who really care about their career. So let’s say someone has finished their residency and fellowship, now what? What are they looking at in their career? What happens, usually?

Trent Harrison: I think that’s an interesting question, because there’s nothing… So here’s the deal is that you finish the residency in fellowship and you’re owed nothing. You’re not going to get like there aren’t going to be things served up to you without you putting in the effort, but your skill set afterwards hopefully speaks for itself. Your resume afterwards is going to be increased because you’re doing a lot of stuff to. If you do the residency and the fellowship during that time, you’re participating in continuing education, you are applying, putting out poster presentations, so next thing you know, your CV is a little bit more padded.

And then like you said before, it’s relationship building. I mean, after I did the residency and fellowship program, I got to work on different committees on national organizations. And that was just because the relationships I’d made through Bob with leaders in these organizations that they then tapped me and said, “Hey, do you want to be a part of this?” And then that opened up more doors for collaboration with other residency coordinators that I would’ve never met had I done that. So there’s a lot of opportunity afterwards. We’ve had past graduates who do a plethora of things.

We have past graduates who are working at the DPT as DPT instructors. In DPT programs, we have some that are now running residencies and fellowships. We have some in private practice. We have some that are on national sporting teams, some that have gone straight business route. I always have to plug Kyle Rice who’s now the PT hustle, which is a training for NPTE, which is the national exam. He does a wonderful job with that. He’s out of clinical practice. So I think that there’s a lot of things you can do post residency and fellowship after you kind of develop those different skill sets, and then those relationships you build along the way.

Bob Rowe: Yeah. Some that have gone into, go and get higher degrees, PhDs and EdDs, and going into research. Specifically within Brooks, I mean, if you look around the system, we have an awful lot of people in leadership roles within Brooks who have completed the residency in fellowship. I think the reason for that is people have recognized that the clinical reasoning, which is another way of saying that is the decision making that is learned through the residency and fellowship translates into administrative decision making. So it helps people become really highly qualified leaders.

Tracy Davis: Absolutely.

Trent Harrison: I think it’s also important to point out that there are some people that after the residency and fellowship, they now do what they wanted to do and what they love to do. They practice and get as good as they can. There wasn’t a, “Oh, I’m doing this for some other reason. I’m doing this so I can now hit the next corporate step or the next this ladder.” It was like, “No, I just wanted to be really good, and now I’m going to become even better by just sitting in my practice, and really now, I have these tool sets.” We’ve got some people like that still that have stuck around in Brooks that are just they’re killing it in terms of like they’re just becoming amazing clinicians. They’re not getting distracted possibly by some of these other things.

Tracy Davis: I mean, they would hope that’d be the big point is patient care. When someone’s trusting you in their care in front of you, that you want to be the best you can.

Bob Rowe: We offer 40 continuing ed courses a year and the vast majority of those are taught by our people, and the vast majority of them, probably 95% or more are our past residents and fellows.

Tracy Davis: Wow, that’s amazing. So wrapping up here, what’s next? What’s next for IHL anything in the future you want to talk about or…

Bob Rowe: Yeah. Probably the biggest thing is we’re building a collaboration with Jacksonville University and we’re going to do a Doctor of Physical Therapy, a DPT program.

Tracy Davis: That’s awesome.

Bob Rowe: That’s in process right now. We’ve submitted our application to the Commission on Accreditation of Physical Therapy Education, CAPTE, and it’s been accepted. So now we’re in line for that. So it takes a couple of years to get through that process. So we’re just patiently waiting our turn, but we’re in development, and so it’s going to be a great program. It’s going to be new and innovative. It’s going to be very, very different than anything that exists out there today. That’s the reason we’re doing it, it’s because it’s going to be so different. We don’t want to do the same thing. That’s the biggest thing. And then we have a lot of other little projects that I’ll call them little compared to that, but new innovative ideas that are in the pipeline there that we’re going to be rolling out.

Tracy Davis: Keep moving forward.

Bob Rowe: Yep.

Tracy Davis: That’s great. Whenever I talk with you guys, I always think of all the acronyms that you guys have to remember. It’s like second to the military healthcare must be next on the acronyms. We’ve got so many. Well, thank you guys for coming on. What’s the website? If anyone wants any more information on the Brooks IHL, where do they go?

Bob Rowe: So it’s Brooksihl.org.

Tracy Davis: Okay.

Bob Rowe: And that’s it.

Tracy Davis: Great. Brooksihl.org. I’ll put that in the show notes of this.

Trent Harrison: Super simple.

Tracy Davis: Yeah. Very easy. Thank you guys.

Bob Rowe: Thank you so much, Tracy.

Trent Harrison: Thanks Tracy.

Bob Rowe: We really appreciate it.