Rebecca Missimer and Mary Fischer: Perspectives on COVID-19

RUSK Insights on Rehabilitation Medicine

Rebecca Missimer is a physical therapy clinical specialist in acute care at Tisch/Kimmel at NYU Langone. She has been a practicing clinician for seven years and is a board-certified clinical specialist in neurologic physical therapy. She works with patients with a variety of diagnoses, including individuals with respiratory, pulmonary, and cardiac issues on the acute floors and in the intensive care units. Mary Fischer is a clinical specialist in acute care at NYU Langone Rusk. She also is a faculty member of the Acute Care Physical Therapy Residence Program. With more than 30 years of experience in acute care, inpatient rehabilitation, outpatient, and home care physical therapy, she was the lead investigator and author of a fall risk study published in the Journal of Acute Care Physical Therapy in October 2020. She is a graduate of Columbia and Stony Brook Universities and is a board-certified Geriatric Clinical Specialist. In this interview, they discuss the kinds of patients treated who already were obtaining rehabilitation services and then subsequently contracted the coronavirus and another group that initially was not involved in rehabilitation, but later required it as a consequence of becoming infected; after-effects either caused or associated with the onset of coronavirus symptoms; conditions among patients that persist well beyond when they initially began to experience symptoms upon becoming infected; population subgroups that may be more prone to continue to experience long-term symptoms; patients that experience a loss of physical function in the form of deconditioning; kinds of respiratory support for patients hospitalized with COVID-19; and research topics for improving patient care.