STANDING TALL: YMCA Executive Director Larry Langford welcomes members and visitors to the Owasso YMCA, located at 8300 North Owasso Expressway.
DAVID JONES for GTR Newspapers
If it worked in Colorado, Susan Plank reasoned, why wouldn’t it work in Oklahoma?
As a result the Owasso YMCA has something unique in the state: its own physical therapy center.
This is, explains Jeff Collins of the center, therapy and not physical training. To utilize all the benefits of the physical therapy branch one needs to be referred by a physician. Wandering off the street and asking for therapy won’t do, for that there are trainers.
The Owasso facility is formally known as St. John Owasso Physical Therapy and is connected with the Owasso hospital branch of St. John.
When a physician refers a patient to the physical therapy unit, says Collins, they get a state-licensed physical therapist to follow them throughout their rehabilitation efforts. “The people utilizing the YMCA are using it as a health club,” he says. “We are more for people coming back from an injury or an operation.”
Plank says if there is another YMCA in Oklahoma formally connected with a hospital in a physical therapy effort she’s unaware of it. “But this won’t be the last,” she says. “There are currently seven YMCAs connected with the greater-Tulsa YMCA with an eighth planned and ultimately I want them all to have physical therapy centers.”
Plank first got the idea of a YMCA-hospital connection when she was the Chief Operating Officer of YMCAs in Colorado Springs.
“We negotiated a partnership with a local hospital and found it led to great interaction. It led to truly a win-win situation. It gives us the full spectrum of health and wellness to offer a community.”
Eight years ago Plank transferred to the Tulsa area where she became the Chief Executive Officer of the area YMCAs. When Owasso’s YMCA, which had been working out of a 35-year-old building, decided it was time to expand she thought a connection with a hospital made perfect sense. She contacted St. John and the arrangement was agreed upon.
“We actually built the building with our funds,” says YMCA Executive Director Larry Langford, “but the lease we agreed to with St. John gave us the financial backing to go ahead. If you go in the main exercise room of the Owasso YMCA you’ll see a lot of regular members using the equipment, but the ones connected with the physical therapy unit will have therapists watching them as they work.”
“We’ve gotten off to a great start,” says Collins. “We only opened in November and already we have 20-30 people a day doing therapy sessions that typically run from 45 minutes to an hour. We now have two full-time physical therapists and two part time.”
Not all the people taking physical therapy are members of the YMCA, but here the agreement between the organizations involved is helpful to the patients. When the time for physical therapy ends, the Owasso YMCA will offer the patient a low-cost membership, which makes moving into the regular YMCA membership easy as well as affordable.
The YMCA does a lot more than just provide exercise and physical therapy. The completion of Phase II gave the facility an aerobics center. It also has a huge swimming pool kept at a warm temperature that helps swimmers from those who just want to do laps to those who want to exercise in a wheelchair; a special ramp allows a chair to slowly enter the water.
The Owasso YMCA offers a wide variety of benefits for everyone from youngsters needing a safe place to stay while the parents are off at work to activities for senior citizens.
“We have a large group of young children dropped off here early in the morning,” says Langford. “We take care of them, get them to school on time, pick them up after school and have them waiting for their parents at day’s end. We serve four of Owasso’s seven grade schools now and next year I hope to be able to serve all seven. When the Stone Canyon public school is opened I hope to be able to serve that, too.”
The original YMCA, now called the Annex, is still serviceable but is showing its age. Langford is looking forward to the time it can be replaced.
“But when we replace it,” he says, “our new building will carry out the same functions of the current building. We’re not going to cut back on any services.”
With the addition of the physical therapy center, it looks more like Owasso’s YMCA is increasing them.
It works in Colorado!
Why not Oklahoma?
