Our Health and Rehab Services Department is dedicated to the treatment and recovery of individuals experiencing the effects of a serious illness or injury or managing a chronic disease. Our team of specialists can help you lead a healthier life and enjoy more of your favorite activities.
Meet our Health & Rehab Team
Joseph Kimball, DO
Medical Director- Brittany Garrison, BSN, RN
Health & Rehab Services Manager - Gabby Johnston
Rehab Services Office Coordinator - Linda Klejch, RD, CDE
Dietitian &
Certified Diabetes Educator - Gretchen Halley,
MAT, RDN, LD, LMNT
Dietitian & Nutritionist - Nancy Fiene, BSN, RN
Cardiopulmonary Rehab - Sally McDonald, RN
Cardiopulmonary Rehab - Becca Rohlf, BSN, RN
Cardiopulmonary Rehab - Amy Whitlatch-Gillum, PT
Physical Therapy - Cynthia McDougall, PT
Physical Therapy - Sarah Langel, DPT
Physical Therapy - Megan Owen, OTR
Occupational Therapy
Who We Are
Our rehabilitation department consists of licensed, expert, and experienced professionals, including:
- Physical Therapists
- Occupational Therapists
- Speech Language Pathologist
- Cardiopulmonary Registered Nurses
- Dietitians, Nutritionists & Certified Diabetes Educators
Will I Need a Referral?
Some services offered require a referral from your primary care provider. Talk with your doctor about whether these programs are a good fit for you. To schedule an appointment, or for more information, give us a call at 515-462-5206.
About Our Services
We are located on the second floor of Madison County Memorial Hospital. We provide a continuum of comprehensive inpatient acute and skilled care, and outpatient services.
With your physician’s prescription, we accept most private insurances, as well as Medicare, Medicaid, and Worker’s Compensation.
Hours: Monday – Friday, 7:30 am – 4:30 pm
Phone: 515-462-5206
Fax: 515-462-5108
Our Services
A supervised exercise program that involves education, nutritional counseling, stress management, smoking cessation and other lifestyle changes designed to prevent or reverse the progression of cardiac and pulmonary diseases.
Cardiac rehabilitation doesn’t change your past, but it can help you improve your heart’s future. Cardiac rehab is a medically supervised program designed to improve your cardiovascular health if you have experienced heart attack, heart failure, angioplasty or heart surgery.
Key Parts of Cardiac Rehab
1. Exercise counseling and training
Exercise gets your heart pumping and your entire cardiovascular system working. You’ll learn how to get your body moving in ways that promote heart health.
2. Education for heart-healthy living
A key element of cardiac rehab is educating yourself: How can you manage your risk factors? Quit smoking? Make heart-healthy nutrition choices?
3. Counseling to reduce stress
Stress hurts your heart. This part of cardiac rehab helps you identify and tackle everyday sources of stress.
Getting started
You don’t need to face heart disease alone. Cardiac rehab is a team effort. You’ll partner our Cardiopulmonary Rehab team – plus family and friends – to take charge of the choices, lifestyle and habits that affect your heart. Here’s how to get going and make the most of cardiac rehab:
- Ask your doctor if you are eligible
- If you are, register for our cardiac rehab program by calling (515) 462-5207
- In consultation with your medical team, set goals for your heart health
- Work together to create a cardiac rehab plan
- Take an active role in your care to achieve your goals
- Keep taking your medicines correctly
- Call 911 if you experience new or worsening symptoms
Pulmonary rehabilitation is a supervised medical program that helps people who have lung diseases live and breathe better. You may need pulmonary rehabilitation if you have a lung disease such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). During the program, you will learn exercises and breathing techniques.
Who needs pulmonary rehabilitation?
Your doctor may recommend pulmonary rehabilitation to help you breathe easier and improve your quality of life for certain lung conditions such as COPD, asthma, pulmonary hypertension, and cystic fibrosis. It can also improve daily life for people who have scoliosis or other health problems that affect how well the lungs work.
Your doctor may also recommend pulmonary rehabilitation before and after surgery for a lung transplant or lung cancer.
What happens during pulmonary rehabilitation?
To help design your pulmonary rehabilitation plan, our team will administer one of the following tests:
- Exercise stress test to measure your oxygen level, blood pressure, and heart rate while you exercise
- Breathing tests to check how well your lungs are working
- Six-minute walk test to measure how far you can walk in six minutes
Your pulmonary rehabilitation plan may include the following training and education:
- Breathing techniques
- Education
- Psychological counseling
- Exercise training
- Nutritional counseling
How long is the pulmonary rehabilitation program?
Usually, pulmonary rehabilitation is a series of 2 or 3 weekly sessions lasting several weeks or months. At the end of your program, you will be given tests to check your lung function again to see if your breathing has improved. Some of these tests, such as exercise tests, will be the same ones you had at the start of your program.
When do you need a therapist?
- Rehabilitation after surgery or injury
- Sprains and muscle strains
- Back and neck pain
- Shoulder, arm, wrist, and hand pain
- Hip, knee, ankle, or foot problems
- Speech pathologies
- Difficulty with swallowing
- Stroke rehabilitation
- Problems with balance
- Developmental disabilities (pediatrics)
Our physical therapists are experts in movement and gross motor function of the spine, upper and lower extremities. They assess and treat diseases and disorders of the musculoskeletal and neuromuscular systems, and provide care to restore normal movement and function.
What is Physical Therapy?
Physical therapy uses various modalities, massage, stretching, and strengthening exercises. The goal is to improve or restore functioning and minimize pain. However, to meet that goal typically requires hard work and pain.
Our physical therapists treat many different conditions, including arthritis, balance problems, carpal tunnel syndrome, gait problems, fractures, frozen shoulder, sports injuries, recovery from stroke, and many other things.
What does Physical Therapy help with?
- Pain
- Strength
- Joint range of motion
- Endurance
- Gross motor skills (large-muscle movements made with the arms, legs, feet, or entire body)
What is Occupational Therapy?
Occupational therapy is therapeutic self-care, work, and play activities to increase independent function, enhance development, and prevent disabilities. It may include adaptation of task or environment to achieve maximum independence and to improve quality of life. They also provide evaluation and treatment of hand and elbow dysfunction, including custom splinting.
Through occupational therapy, your therapist will empower you to take ownership of your progress. Healing is not something that happens in 45-minute increments, three times a week. You should leave each session with a clear understanding of what you can be doing outside of the treatment session to bolster your progress. Your occupational therapist provides a clear plan for translating the results into your home setting, where you can maintain the progress without their intervention.
What does Occupational Therapy help with?
- Fine motor skills (small-muscle movements made with the hands, fingers, and toes, such as grasping)
- Visual-perceptual skills
- Cognitive (thinking) skills
- Sensory-processing problems
Physical therapy and occupational therapy both help improve your quality of life, but there are key differences.
Physical therapy (PT) helps with:
- pain
- strength
- joint range of motion
- endurance
- gross motor skills (large-muscle movements made with the arms, legs, feet, or entire body)
Occupational therapy (OT) helps with:
- fine motor skills (small-muscle movements made with the hands, fingers, and toes, such as grasping)
- visual-perceptual skills
- cognitive (thinking) skills
- sensory-processing problems
Our Speech-Language Pathologists are experts in the assessment and treatment of diagnoses affecting defects and disorders of the voice, and written and spoken communication. This includes cognitive and reasoning deficits as a result of disease or injury to the brain. They also evaluate and treat swallowing disorders.
There are several speech and language disorders that can be treated with speech therapy.
- Articulation disorders. An articulation disorder is the inability to properly form certain word sounds. A child with this speech disorder may drop, swap, distort, or add word sounds. An example of distorting a word would be saying “thith” instead of “this”.
- Fluency disorders. A fluency disorder affects the flow, speed, and rhythm of speech. Stuttering and cluttering are fluency disorders. A person with stuttering has trouble getting out a sound and may have speech that is blocked or interrupted, or may repeat part of all of a word. A person with cluttering often speaks very fast and merges words together.
- Resonance disorders. A resonance disorder occurs when a blockage or obstruction of regular airflow in the nasal or oral cavities alters the vibrations responsible for voice quality. It can also happen if the velopharyngeal valve doesn’t close properly. Resonance disorders are often associated with cleft palate, neurological disorders, and swollen tonsils.
- Receptive disorders. A person with receptive language disorder has trouble understanding and processing what others say. This can cause you to seem uninterested when someone is speaking, have trouble following directions, or have a limited vocabulary. Other language disorders, autism, hearing loss, and a head injury can lead to a receptive language disorder.
- Expressive disorders. Expressive language disorder is difficulty conveying or expressing information. If you have an expressive disorder, you may have trouble forming accurate sentences, such as using incorrect verb tense. It’s associated with developmental impairments, such as Down syndrome and hearing loss. It can also result from head trauma or a medical condition.
- Cognitive-communication disorders. Difficulty communicating because of an injury to the part of the brain that controls your ability to think is referred to as cognitive-communication disorder. It can result in memory issues, problem solving, and difficulty speaking, or listening. It can be caused by biological problems, such abnormal brain development, certain neurological conditions, a brain injury, or stroke.
- Aphasia. This is an acquired communication disorder that affects a person’s ability to speak and understand others. It also often affects a person’s ability to read and write. Stroke is the most common cause of aphasia, though other brain disorders can also cause it.
- Dysarthria. This condition is characterized by slow or slurred speech due to a weakness or inability to control the muscles used for speech. It’s most commonly caused by nervous system disorders and conditions that cause facial paralysis or throat and tongue weakness, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and stroke.
Speech therapy for children
Speech therapy exercises and activities vary depending on a child’s disorder, age, and needs. During speech therapy for children, the Speech Therapist may:
- Interact through talking and playing, and using books, pictures other objects as part of language intervention to help stimulate language development
- Model correct sounds and syllables for a child during age-appropriate play to teach the child how to make certain sounds
- Provide strategies and homework for the child and parent or caregiver on how to do speech therapy at home
Speech therapy for adults
Speech therapy for adults also begins with assessment to determine your needs and the best treatment. Speech therapy exercises for adults can help you with speech, language, and cognitive communication.
Therapy may also include retraining of swallowing function if an injury or medical condition, such as Parkinson’s disease or oral cancer has caused swallowing difficulties.
Exercises may involve:
- Problem solving, memory, and organization, and other activities geared at improving cognitive communication
- Conversational tactics to improve social communication
- Breathing exercises for resonance
- Exercises to strengthen oral muscles
How long do you need speech therapy?
The amount of time you will need speech therapy depends on a few factors, including:
- Your age
- Type and severity of the speech disorder
- Frequency of therapy
- Underlying medical condition
- Treatment of an underlying medical condition
Some speech disorders begin in childhood and improve with age, while others continue into adulthood and require long-term therapy and maintenance. A communication disorder caused by a stroke or other medical condition may improve with treatment and as the condition improves.
What is Medical Nutrition Therapy (MNT)?
This is a therapeutic approach to treating medical conditions and their associated symptoms via the use of a specifically tailored diet devised and monitored by a registered dietitian.
If you have diabetes and would like to:
- Improve your blood sugar and A1C levels
- Better manage your cholesterol and blood pressure
- Save money on diabetes supplies
- Learn skills to better manage your diabetes and be able to do the things you enjoy
Our Diabetes Educator
Linda Klejch, RDLD, CDE
A Diabetes Educator is an individual who has specialized training, and often, has a personal connection to diabetes, so they understand what you are going through. Our diabetic educators, Aaron and Linda, can help you successfully manage all aspects of your diabetes and put the skills you learn into practice.
Diabetes can be an overwhelming and difficult disease to manage. Aaron and Linda will work with you to design a specific plan that meets you where you are and provides the tools and support you need.
Get the knowledge you need to control diabetes for life.
Diabetes Self-Management Education (DSME) will provide you with resources and skills to help you learn how to manage your diabetes and be as healthy as possible. DSME focuses on seven self-care behaviors:
- Healthy eating
- Being active
- Monitoring
- Taking medication, if applicable
- Problem solving
- Healthy coping
- Reducing risks
You will work one-on-one with a diabetes educator, as well as learn about other local resources in your community. DSME is covered by most insurances and offers flexible times that are most convenient for you and your family. To get started, you will need a referral from our primary care physician.
Diabetes education works.
Studies show that individuals who participate in diabetes education can experience lower blood sugar, lower A1C levels, and decreased blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Diabetes education has also been shown to help increase self-esteem, coping abilities, and the ability to successfully manage diabetes. We provide flexible, individualized instruction to ensure you gain the skills you need for success.
Special classes available for:
- Insulin start and adjustment
- Continuous glucose monitoring
- Pregnancy
For more information, give us a call at 515-462-5206.
Often, patients on the path to recovery from strokes or heart problems are prescribed anticoagulation treatments, like Warfarin. Anticoagulants are medicines prescribed to slow down the body’s own clotting process and to keep the blood thing.
At Madison County Health & Rehab, our Warfarin Management Program serves the specialized testing, monitoring and prescription needs of patients undergoing treatment with Warfarin (Coumadin). This program has greatly enhanced the safety and proper dosing of medication for all patients enrolled.
Benefits to Patients
- Comprehensive, ongoing patient education and communication
- Consistent and prompt INR monitoring
- Prompt dosage adjustments
- Intervention for drug interactions
If you are currently taking Warfarin or any other Anticoagulant and are interested in speaking with our team to learn more about your medication, please speak with your physician for a referral.
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Heart Healthy Recipes
Chicken Fajita Bowl
This Chicken Fajita Bowl is packed with perfectly seasoned chicken and peppers, fluffy rice, flavor packed Pico de Gallo and a delicious lime crema drizzle! Perfect for Meal Prep!
Strawberry Angel Food Dessert
This homemade strawberry angel food dessert is light, airy and perfectly satisfying every time. Perfect spring and summertime dessert! You can also make it with a variety of other berry favorites!
Apple Bread
An easy Apple Bread recipe that’s loaded with shredded apples and warm spices. This moist cinnamon apple bread is perfect with a morning cup of coffee!
Skillet Zucchini
This delicious Skillet Zucchini is a favorite zucchini recipe and makes a perfect dish that‘s quick, easy and goes great as your main meal or a colorful side! Keep this recipe at the top of your list this summer, using your own garden harvest or locally fresh produce stands or farmer’s market.
Egg Roll in a Bowl
Egg Roll in a Bowl is a one-pan dinner made in 20 minutes and is packed with protein and flavor. Made with either ground pork or beef, this Keto recipe tastes just like an Asian egg roll but without the egg roll wrapper.
