A Lasting Impact: Harriett B. Loehne, PT, DPT, CWS, FACCWS

Despite her ‘retirement,’ Harriett B. Loehne, PT, DPT, CWS, FACCWS, continues to advance the role of PTs in wound care.   For many of us, retirement will come along rather routinely. A date will be set, we’ll count the number of remaining workdays as they grow fewer and fewer, and we’ll acknowledge that it’s become time to allow our schedules to revolve around our personal time. Then there are those like Harriett B. Loehne, PT, DPT, CWS, FACCWS, who mean too much to their respective industry to have the opportunity to simply walk away from their careers — even if their accomplishments go well beyond what they could have envisioned for themselves.   Loehne, who celebrates her 70th birthday this year, formally retired from the Archbold Center for Wound Management and Hyperbaric Medicine in Thomasville, GA, Oct. 6 after a career in healthcare that has spanned nearly half a century. However, with her continued work as an educator, lecturer, and advisor, it’s difficult to label that retirement as “official,” despite her possessing more free time to spend in her garden, with her grandchildren, or attending homecoming events at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, her alma mater, since her decision. In fact, not only did Loehne find difficulty in leaving the clinical wound care setting, an area of care that she became fully invested in as a physical therapist in the late 1980s, she also felt outright guilty toward her patients, her staff members, and even herself.   “It was a very difficult decision to retire from full-time work at Archbold because I really loved what I did there,” said Loehne, who was recently honored by the North American Center for Continuing Medical Education (NACCME) LLC with an SAWC (Symposium on Advanced Wound Care) Wound Care Therapist Scholarship as part of the organization’s “Gives Back” program. “I felt like I was ‘abandoning’ everyone in some way, even though I’m sure the person who is in my former position now is doing a wonderful job,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave, but I knew I wanted to expand my role in wound care in other ways and have more time to do teaching, consulting, and presenting.”   Through the launch of her own company — Harriett B. Loehne & Associates LLC/WISE (Wound & Integumentary Specialty Education) — she’s accomplishing just that and is channeling her experience and newfound ability to flex her schedule to speak at national conferences, host continuing education courses and employee training programs, and write journal articles and contribute research to textbooks. As one who has essentially “grown up” in wound care as a PT by breaking into the industry just as the role of PTs broke ground within this area of care, she offers a sheer wealth of knowledge and resources that she can’t justifiably bring to a complete halt.

Historical Wound Care Perspective

  A 1965 graduate of UNC, Loehne spent several years as a staff physical therapist at the university’s Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill and began her own private practice at Houston County Hospital in Warner Robins, GA, where she would launch the facility’s first PT department in 1967. Loehne’s career would see significant advancement while on staff at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, Winston-Salem, NC, where she joined the staff in 1988 and spent nearly 15 years. During this time she would redefine her practice as a wound management therapist, acquiring an advanced wound care knowledge and working with clinicians who would become nationally renowned for more effectively integrating PT and wound care.   “I was fortunate enough to be at Wake Forrest when Louis Argenta, MD and Michael Morykwas, PhD developed the first device for negative pressure wound therapy in the US, which has brought a huge change to wound management,” Loehne said. “By delivering a vacuum through a dressing at the wound site, it helps to draw the wound edges together, removes exudates, and actively promotes granulation.” Loehne was also ambitious enough to seek a better understanding of the role of the PT in wound care and advance the impact of her practice among her wound care patient population. At its roots, the function of the PT among wound care patients at that time was not much more than dipping them into whirlpools and providing dry-gauze dressing changes, Loehne explained.   “We were not really understanding why we were doing that or what it was doing for the patient; it was just an historical thing — something we always did in PT,” she continued. “Physicians were taught that it was the appropriate thing to do, and we got their orders, and patients were sent down to us. But then pulsed lavage with suction came along and eliminated the need for whirlpools and definitely made a huge change in irrigating and cleansing. And we began to realize that it might not be the appropriate thing to do and that there was more going on with wounds that we needed to learn. It was a matter of research and educating, and teaching healthcare providers what we could do together to make things better for the wound care patient. And whirlpools are certainly contraindicated in a lot of situations that we used to use because we didn’t know any different.”   Still, growing with the profession is something Loehne said she wouldn’t trade for anything, regardless of whether it wasn’t the exact career trajectory she envisioned for herself while still in school. “I always wanted to be a surgeon, so, when physical therapists started getting involved with wound care, that seemed like a wonderful fit,” she said.   That proof lies in the numerous awards and accolades she’s collected throughout her career, which go well beyond her most recent honor.

A Wealth of Achievement

  A longtime member of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA), an organization for which Loehne has served in many capacities, including being newly elected as president of the APTA’s section on Clinical Electrophysiology and Wound Management (CEWM) and chairperson of the task force for Physical Therapy Specialization for Wound Management, Loehne was awarded the CEWM’s Professional Merit Award in 2000. She has also served 2 terms on the board of directors for the Association for the Advancement of Wound Care (AAWC), earning the association’s Distinguished Member Award in 2004. As an original member of the AAWC’s Global Alliance Task Force, a group of clinicians that travels abroad to provide missionary wound care, she was selected to visit Vellore, India, in February 2007 to serve as the alliance’s first program director. In 2009 she was named Partner of the Year by the Georgia Partnership for Telehealth, a statewide initiative that seeks to increase access to healthcare through innovative uses of technology such as telemedicine programs, health information exchanges, and telehealth systems.   Her latest award by NACCME has come at a most relevant time in that it stamps the presence she has made within the industry as a clinician at a time when she’s transitioning to a somewhat parallel career path. The financial gift that came with the award (which funded her participation in SAWC Fall 2012) also proved to be timely as she takes risks as an entrepreneur.   “My first reaction to the scholarship was, ‘Wow - to be recognized by my peers,’” Loehne said. “To see all those people at the SAWC scholarship reception was such a humbling experience. It’s a huge, huge honor. It means so much to me because SAWC is such a respected conference by all my colleagues — it’s just an immense honor.”

Impacting the Future of PT

  Throughout the next phase of her career, Loehne expects to educate and empower fellow and aspiring therapists who are seeking to continue to enhance the role of the PT in wound care. Still, she acknowledges that there’s already a significant impression being made by the profession in general.   “I think we as PTs bring a lot to the patient who’s living with wounds with our background knowledge of physiology, pathology, and anatomy,” she said. “We’re treating the whole patient, not, as my mentor Carrie Sussman, PT, DPT, would say, the ‘hole’ in the patient. We understand offloading and gait training, strengthening and conditioning, range of motion, increasing circulation and strength — and all of these things play a part in the patient with the wound because the limb in which the wound occurs also needs to be managed. In the next few years we will all have doctorates at the entry level.”   While that represents further evolution of the licensure since the dawn of her career, Loehne is secure in the presence that she will continue to play within the industry and within the healthcare spectrum.   “I owe so much to the people who’ve taught me over the years, and if I can give back in any way by mentoring young clinicians who are coming along, that’s what I really look forward to doing,” she said. “I want to contribute as long as I can. That’s my passion. And all my guilt is gone.”