"The people who come to me have all gone through a lot in terms of treatment."
Karen Smith
Karen Smith, 30, qualified as a physiotherapist nine years ago. She has been working at the Marie Curie Hospice, Hampstead for two and half years, treating both inpatients and outpatients in the hospice's gym and hydrotherapy pool.
She said: “The people who come to me have all gone through a lot in terms of treatment; surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy and it can take a lot of control away from them.
"Coming to the gym, enrolling in an exercise programme, they can do something really positive for themselves which makes a lot of difference to how they feel and, by improving their physical mobility, I can enable them to have a better quality of life.
“Working at the hospice, you can also be quite imaginative with your treatments. We have taken a couple and their three-year-old into the hydrotherapy pool so they could swim together as a family. In a normal pool they wouldn't have been able to do that but here, we were able to use a hoist. It was amazing to see that family spending time together in the water.”
Photo credit: David Bebber/Dobson Agency
