Written by Brittney Moreis, MS, OTR/L
Virtual Hand to Shoulder Fellow ‘20
Best practice hand therapy services are rapidly and constantly evolving. We all know it’s important to stay up to date on current best practice guidelines, but it can be difficult to find that extra time to do so.
Instagram has been a very powerful social media platform ever since its introduction. It’s user-friendly set up and generally pleasing aesthetic make it a favorite for all types of people and businesses. In this post, I describe how Instagram can add to your resources, expand your network, and enrich your knowledge. While it is no replacement for staying current with peer reviewed literature or taking continuing education courses, it is certainly a great way to spend those 10 spare minutes we have in dentist office waiting rooms or while sipping morning coffee!
First, I cover details on how to get the most out of your Instagram account features to keep your references easily accessible. Then, in no particular order, I provide you with a list of 15 hand therapy focused Instagram pages that I have found to be relevant, consistent, and fun! There is general content that all the pages share, including inspirational updates on what their therapists are doing to stay current, complex orthotic creations, creative treatment modalities, and general exercises for common injuries. Each page also has its own unique flare that they are happy to share with us fellow hand therapy enthusiasts. Lastly, I provide you with a short description on what else each page provides that allows it to stand out from the rest.
Staying active on Instagram is a terrific way to connect with like-minded individuals near and far. By “liking”, commenting on, and reposting posting photos to your “story” and “timeline” with appropriate crediting, you will naturally grow your network. Instagram is a hopeful, playful and efficient resource to keep us excited about the awesome potential of hand therapy. I hope you find these pages as educational and interesting as I do, just remember to fact check your resources before you dive in too deep and enjoy your discoveries!
To get the most out of your Instagram account, consider these features:
Maintain relevant notifications in your Instagram news feed:
Click “follow” on the pages you are interested in
Utilize the hashtag feature
“Follow” relevant hashtags by clicking the magnifying glass, tags, and entering in trending hand therapy hashtags, and clicking the blue “follow”
You can stay aware of by noticing what the pages hashtag in their photo caption such as “#handtherapy, #cht, and #handsurgery
Save posts you would like to reference back to in organized folders:
Click the tab button right below the photo to the right, which prompts a “save to collection” along bottom of photo to click on.
Once you click” save to collection”, you can create your own folder topics to save the posts to.
Double click the photo to “like” the photo, which can be found in your “post you’ve liked” folder.
To review your liked photos: click the 3 horizontal arrows in top right, settings, account, posts you’ve liked.
Powerful OT hand therapy instagram accounts for Summer 2020:
Hand Therapy Academy is made up of Two CHT’s out of Hand Therapy Partners Greater Phoenix metro area with a passion for innovation and teaching patients and therapists. Their page is full of a little bit of everything including splint making tips, treatment ideas, and even great visuals for photos for anatomy and kinesiology review.
High five hand therapy is a sports ortho rehab clinic in Garden Grove California. They provide their followers with great videos of how to correctly perform a wide array of exercises, and videos on tool assisted and manual treatment.
Hulch and therapy is a clinic based in Western Australia sharing tons of fancy splinting ideas and up-close and detailed treatment ideas and plenty other ways to make use of your orthotic material.
Sheri E. Roberts runs the hand in mind page, a creative and brilliant CHT who has combined her creativity and extensive knowledge to bring us beautiful OT jewelery, one of a kind clinical resources, and those treatment products you have been hoping someone would create!
Hand therapy group is a clinic based in Sydney Australia that also reviews splinting ideas and explores many different types of splinting material and updates on hand therapy in the media, descriptions of common injuries seen in upper extremity clinics and tips for overall hand health.
Low county hands is a Savannah based Hand Therapy Team that keeps us followers amazed. They provide us with pictures of lacerations and wounds and descriptions on how these injuries were obtained, a great way to understand what structures we could expect to be compromised based on mechanisms of injury and a good visual.
Along with orthotic master Debby Schwartz providing us with terrific step by step videos, the Orfit Industries official Instagram page also provides us with tons of splinting hacks and constant invites to free splinting webinars.
Lang hand therapy, a private practice, invites us into their hand therapy clinic in the heart of NYC to show us videos and photos of how well they have mastered static progressive splints. Along with the rest of their rich content, they provide us with a wide array of adaptive equipment, ergonomic, task modification solutions.
Michelle Coli is the host of the @virtualhandcare page, a hand therapist based in Texas very involved in the world of teletherapy. Check this page out for all things virtual, from technical support to treatment ideas.
This team of therapists of Nova hand therapy based in Virginia that stands out by supplying us with a birds eye view of the culture of their clinic. They are constantly sharing interesting and educational patient stories, showing us what a top notch clinic that cares for its community looks like.
A team of therapists in Johannesburg, Hand Consult of South Africa is doing some really impressive stuff with 3D printing orthotics. They keep therapists informed on 3D printing splinting options and even provide consulting on how to tie it into your virtual hand therapy.
@hands.on.ot is ran by Carike Odenaal Occupational therapist from the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Their interesting images are always well descriptive, and they often have cool side-by-sides to show us the typical progression of many common injuries hand therapists encounter.
@Rarashandtherapy is the Instagram account of a study blog created by an aspiring CHT, for an aspiring CHT. Some photos posted is a summary of her super informative blog post you can find linked in her bio, others are colorful anatomy photos that are very well labeled which makes them perfect study tools.
@hand_therapy_exercises is a page ran by an OT in an outpatient hand therapy clinic in New Jersey who constantly reminds us that we are the artists of the medical field. This homemade labyrinth she created is one of many posts she has shared, reminding all that the opportunities for fun, affordable and effective treatment ideas are endless.
@handprep is the Instagram account of 2 occupational therapists that learned the importance of creating questions for each other when they were studying for their CHT exam, so they created a CHT prep exam book. On this interactive Instagram account, they post common terms like and encourage followers to swipe to next photo as if they’re flipping over a flash card to test their knowledge.