>I visited the real world today, and became a new client of an RPT -- a >Registered Physical Therapist. But you're right -- before today, I >wouldn't have known. > >--Jim Harvey I'll probably regret this post in the morning... A few members of this list know that I have told tales over the years about the "other RPT's". I have a new tale to tell. Actually, WE must be the "other" RPT's: I don't know how long physical therapists have used the RPT designation, but my wife, Bonnie, has been an RPT for 19 years, and by the way, there are hundreds of thousands of physical therapists. During the time that Bonnie has been a physical therapist, the demand has grown by leaps and bounds. Physical therapists have been in very short supply for years, pushing salaries way up. It is definitely a "seller's market" for RPT's. My career as a piano technician has thus far been secondary to my wife's career. She is the director of a PT department at a large teaching hospital. I have been lucky enough to arrange my work schedules for the past 11 years, if at rather low wages, so that my kids would not be in day care. My kids are older now and less in need of day care, so I have been looking to increase my piano technician income. This has proved to be, shall we say, somewhat more difficult than I had anticipated. My outlook wasn't helped much, then, when my wife related to me the following experience of one of the RPT's she went to school with: Karen has 19 years experience as an RPT and has advanced degrees that would qualify her for management positions, but salaries are so good for staff physical therapists, she decided long ago to forego the headaches of being a manager. She has two elementary-school-aged sons. She recently changed jobs in order to arrange her schedule around her sons' school days. She told prospective employers that she could not come to work each day until she had taken her sons to school, that she would have to be done each day in time to pick her sons up when school was out, that she would have to be late to work some days becuase she wanted to work part-time as a PT in the Special Ed. program at the sons' school, and she couldn't work at all on days that school wasn't in session, although her sons would go to day care in the summer. A hospital accepted her conditions, and she is now working for them, doing "home health," that is, providing therapy at the patient's homes, for a salary of, GULP!, $60,000 per year. This is in Wichita, Kansas, by the way, not in a coastal city where the cost-of-living is high. I'll hang in there, arranging my work schedule around my kid's school days, but I haven't really recovered from hearing this tale about the "other kind" of RPT. I wish my wife had kept it to herself. Kent Swafford
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