[Garden City, KS] November 3, 2021 — GCCC students had an exciting new opportunity this year when a combined $2000 scholarship and paid internship experience were created by Accelacare Physical Therapy. The first recipient of the Accelacare-GCCC Scholarship is Cielo Garcia, from Hugoton, KS.

Cielo is a current nursing major at GCCC. She is working her way up the nursing field to pursue her dreams of becoming a Registered Nurse. Cielo is also a current XC/Track runner for Garden City Community College. She has been running competitively for school since the 6th grade, as she has always had a passion for running which was inspired by her family.

Cielo is excited to have this internship opportunity and serve as a Rehabilitation Technician for Accelacare Physical Therapy. She shared her reason for applying, “I wanted to work at Accelacare because I like to work with people, I like to help out others and, here at Accelacare you get to help others. Another reason why I choose to work at Accelacare is, because you get to see a lot of insight of what a physical therapist does. Since I’ve started working here at Accelacare, I have learned a lot about the body that I did not know, and even though physical therapy isn’t my major, learning about the body and the muscles help me out a lot in my nursing major.”

The Accelacare-GCCC scholarship is open to current GCCC students with a GPA of 3.0 or higher, an interest in healthcare, the capability and skill with helping others, and the ability to speak both Spanish and English. This opportunity allows the student to be a critical part of the team that makes sure that each patient’s experience is maximized – from beginning to end. Accelacare provides support and training to help a student grow into the role. The application is available on their website: https://www.accelacarept.com/employment-application-form/?position=Rehab%20technician

To learn more about Accelacare Physical Therapy, give them a call at 620-271-0700, stop by 1800 Palace Drive, Suite C in Garden City, or visit their website at https://www.accelacarept.com

OPEN LETTER TO THE COMMUNITY

To our community,

Over the past couple years, we have thought a lot about what Garden City and the surrounding communities might look like 20 years from now. There are so many visions of a better tomorrow yet the consistent idea between each of the visions was achieving economic growth for all of our residents. Doing so means that our community has a great chance of making tomorrow better than today.

We understand that long-term financial growth for tomorrow only arises from solving problems that make lives better today. We are opening a general practice clinic because making money in the future must follow from today’s patients getting well sooner and helping them avoid getting sick as often. If our healthcare community performs well, everyone is happier at work and in their personal lives. When our community gets healthier, we are more likely to create new solutions to problems, including the ones we haven’t envisioned yet.

So, how might we achieve better health with more income as a community?

We need to solve for a patient’s health needs faster.

We need to solve for a patients health needs more cost-effectively.

Better collaboration seems the only way forward. Collaboration between our providers, between specialties, between local groups and with the community. It’s why we hired a management consultant with an economics background. We needed to understand the multiple challenges we face, how they are interconnected and then execute on a solution, both as a clinic and as a community.

Last year, we made public our intent to open a general practice clinic. We now want to explain how the general practice clinic will function: We will have a family practice doctor and physical therapist work together in the same location, treating a new patient together where necessary.

Patients who need family practice care but thought they might need physical therapy will be identified more quickly, where an injection or diagnostic gives everyone more information before identifying treatment options.

Patients who might otherwise spend money on medications, injections and diagnostic tests will get the relief they need more quickly by understanding why their problem exists and learning how to move correctly.

This is why we believe general practice doctors and physical therapists sharing information for some patients is likely to provide a better solution.

While we believe this model is the best way to access care initially, we think it is just the beginning. Many patients benefit from collaboration of more than two providers. For example, if a patient has severe diabetes, they could potentially need several solutions delivered together.

Along with the PT-GP model, our long-term plans include collaboration in the same facility that integrates maternal, nutritional, mental health and sleep therapy.

We all know that better lifestyle habits reduce major health problems and providing information to the patient is one of the primary ways to improve lifestyle habits.

We also know that stress affects each of us, in so many aspects of our health–pain, digestive issues, sleep, appetite, mood.

In healthcare, one primary driver of patient stress is lack of information. We believe collaboration reduces this stress.

Our community already has outreach surgeons providing care to our region and we are far better for it. We have begun to work with providers and hospitals in the region to identify the remaining healthcare needs and fill those gaps in care so that we all have access to as many types of specialty providers as possible. To supplement, Maternal Health, Dermatology, and Neurology are a few specialties where we believe we can contribute–but there are many more as well.

We are currently looking for a space to execute on this vision.

As members of this community, we believe that we (Accelacare) will benefit from this approach. As providers who started in physical therapy, we know that many people go through life limited by pain, taking pain medications that are harmful to the body. As providers seeing the opportunities of collaboration, we know that working together with other providers will allow us to find better solutions to improve health. This holds true for every one of our organizations. We want our employers and employees to be financially healthy, and capable of making investments into the future which will make our patients’ lives better and benefit us as a community.

We look forward to the future together.