Sept. 18-24 marks National Rehabilitation Awareness Week. Children’s Minnesota offers a wide range of pediatric physical medicine and rehabilitation services to help patients achieve their goals.
To celebrate this collaborative team, we are excited to introduce you to Brianna Albrecht, a physical therapist at Children’s Minnesota’s rehabilitation clinic in Woodbury. Read on to get to know Brianna!
Tell us about your role and day-to-day activities.
I am an outpatient physical therapist in our Woodbury rehabilitation clinic. As a physical therapist, I spend the majority of my day one-on-one with patients and their families. We see children from just a few weeks old through their early twenties for a variety of reasons. Diagnoses we treat include torticollis and plagiocephaly, gross motor delay, gait abnormalities, pain, and concussion. Additionally, I specialize in treatment of bowel and bladder dysfunction in the pediatric population. Some of the diagnoses that we can help manage are constipation, incontinence, and dysfunctional voiding.
During a typical session, we spend time performing exercises targeted at achieving the goals we have set with the family. We also spend time educating the family on ways to support our goals at home. When I am not with patients, you can often find our team joining together to collaborate on the care of our patients.
What do you want patients, families and staff to know about the work you do?
Physical therapy can be hard work for both the patient and the family, but the impact our treatment can have on a child’s quality of life can be so meaningful.
What do you love most about working in a pediatric setting?
There is so much to love! I love that I get to be creative and think of ways to make incredibly challenging activities engaging and fun for kids. I also enjoy developing relationships with patients and families and getting to see kids grow and thrive.
What inspired you to want to work at Children’s Minnesota?
Working for Children’s Minnesota has been one of my career goals for many years. It is exciting to work alongside so many talented PTs, OTs and speech therapists who are working hard to advance the care we provide every day. Having the opportunity to work closely with other medical specialists throughout the organization allows us to improve patients’ experiences and outcomes as well.
What do you think makes kids remarkable?
The kids we see every day are so resilient. We are often a part of witnessing a child doing a skill for the first time that their family thought they might never be able to do. It’s priceless!
