Pros
My co-workers were pleasant to work with and were honestly one of the bright spots of my day; unfortunately, they were overworked too, which caused them to stress also. Benefits were good, but were slightly higher than other places I had worked; however, I didn’t complain since I always felt like I had good health insurance. Free CEU courses were provided, but they were misleading since you couldn’t actually pick what you wanted. You are only provided with the free CEU courses that PT Solutions wants you to take and that they teach themselves. The CEU courses are a “pro” if you just need to get CEU hours. Salary was competitive to other employers in my area, but they will work you to death for that salary.
Cons
Unfortunately this job consisted of more cons than pros, for me. Staff was overworked and under appreciated. Even when expressing to upper management the need for more staff (and numbers to support it), they never actively searched for more PTs/PTAs. We were constantly told they would search, but not once did they actually list a job opening for my area/clinics. It is hard to take PTO time, due to limited staff working and PT Solutions expectations of how many patients should be seen in a day. Even if I wanted just 1 day off, I would have to request it 3-4 weeks in advance and was honestly made to feel guilty for wanting a day off from work. If you want to take a week off for summer vacation (or something similar), you better request that off 5 months in advance. Raises/cost of living increases are not given annually. You have to be “nominated” to get a raise based on your work/performance. I was promised that I would be getting a raise since I had been working so hard, only to find out when I gave my 30 day notice, that they never submitted for me to actually receive a raise. I have since heard similar stories from other employees at this company. Sadly, you can’t trust what they tell you. Most days, I arrived at the clinic at 7:30 and never left before 6:00 (sometimes later). Then I had to complete my documentation at home. I understand that sometimes you have to stay late to accommodate patients or to make sure everything is finished because I do this at my current job, but PT Solutions expected this daily. When PT Solutions decided to expand their practice, they opened a new clinic before having adequate staffing. I was asked to help “1 time” at this clinic and was promised that it would just be that once. It soon became a weekly occurrence that they would try to pull me to the other clinic. The clinic was approximately a 50 minute drive from my home clinic. I was expected to still start at 8:00 and take 4:00 patients (even requested me to see a 5:00 patient once). Plus, have documentation completed before leaving, since it was on a different documentation system. They didn’t care that I was adding almost 2 hours in drive time to my day to “do them a favor.” You were expected to see more patients than could reasonably be handled. It felt like “quantity” of patients was more important than the “quality” of care received. Since leaving PT Solutions, I have ran into former patients who told me they would rather go to any other PT clinic in town than return to PT Solutions because they felt like they were one out of a million patients. They believe there is only one way to treat patients and that is the PT Solutions way. The beauty of physical therapy is that you can treat patients differently according to their individual needs. PT Solutions has algorithms for you to follow for several different diagnosis. Multiple times, I was told to follow the algorithms and that we all needed to be treating patients the same. I appreciated the research behind their algorithms, but sometimes patients don’t fit into every mold and need different treatments not on their algorithms.
