New therapy rooms opened at Floyd County Medical Center

To the Press

The Floyd County Medical Center recently opened two new therapy rooms, serving children and adults.

Speech therapist Sara Stewart and occupational therapist Kim Sterken said the new pediatric gym and sensory room, as well as a new therapy kitchen, will help expand and change the way they can do therapy with a lot of their patients.

“Our mission is to give every person the ability to have a voice,” said Stewart. “We serve a wide range of patients who either were born without, or have lost, the ability to communicate. These rooms really expand and facilitate what we can do.”

Sterken said, “More and more we have found that we have some patients who are just not capable of sitting down at a table and working. This gives us an environment where they can swing while holding a notepad and write, or maybe they are in the ball pit and we can ask them to say words or to reach for items.

“We can get pretty creative in here,” she said. “It’s also fun and has increased compliability because kids want to come in here.”

Sterken said the therapy kitchen “helps us prepare adult patients to go home.”

“It also helps show the patients whether or not they are ready to go home. It really gives us a lot more tools to make sure that we are giving our patients the best service,” she said.

Stewart said the rooms would not have been possible without the support of the administrative staff, including Neil Tuttle, “who was really the brains and the designer;” along with the contractors and the therapy, maintenance and housekeeping staffs at the hospital.

The Charles City Chamber Ambassadors recently joined some of the staff and clients at Floyd County Medical Center to celebrate the ribbon-cutting for the two new therapy rooms.