St. Tammany Health System’s Rehabilitation Services program helps children and adults regain strength, mobility, and independence through expert physical, occupational, and speech therapy. Specialized outpatient services are available for conditions ranging from stroke and orthopedic injuries to pediatric therapy, lymphedema, and pelvic floor rehabilitation.
Let our rehabilitation team help you get back into the action safely, effectively and compassionately.
Bouncing back can be tougher than it sounds. Sometimes, you need a little help – which happens to be the specialty of the multidisciplinary rehabilitation services team at St. Tammany Health System.
Our team, which includes board-certified and state-licensed occupational, physical and speech therapists, is qualified to conduct a wide range of outpatient services, whether helping children believe in themselves or helping adults return to an independent and active lifestyle.
Operating out of our Therapy and Wellness Center just off Louisiana 21 and several satellite locations through the community, our programs and services target a multitude of conditions. Among them:
STHS Director of Outpatient Rehab Services Mike McNeil offers a virtual tour of the new orthopedic rehab gym built as part of a major expansion of STHS’s Bone & Joint Clinic.
As part of its suite of full-service of physical therapy offerings, St. Tammany Health System has teamed with the New Heights Equestrian Therapeutic Riding Center in Folsom, where patients can benefit from hippotherapy, or therapeutic horseback riding, in addition to traditional physical therapy treatments.
In addition to addressing general orthopedic and neurological diagnoses, the STHS outpatient rehab team offers such specialized services as certified hand therapy; lymphedema management; pediatric occupational, physical and speech therapy; and employment screenings.
STHS’s nation-leading Musculoskeletal Ultrasound program (MSKUS) is a leading-edge modality leveraging the same painless, harmless technology used in pregnancy ultrasounds to diagnose ailing joints and muscles. Learn more below.
St. Tammany Health System’s nation-leading Musculoskeletal Ultrasound program (MSKUS), an offshoot of an award-winning 2016 initiative to explore non-pharmaceutical methods of treating pain, is a leading-edge modality leveraging the same painless, harmless technology used in pregnancy ultrasounds to quickly diagnose ailing joints and muscles.
In the hands of clinicians trained to interpret the resulting real-time images, it can often lead to an immediate diagnosis. That allows patients to avoid the 30-day waiting period most insurance companies require before approving advanced imaging – and thus to avoid 30 days of pain and 30 days of exposure to opioids and other powerful painkillers.
The upshot: quick, low-cost answers to help patients return to their normal routines with as little disruption to their lives as possible.
“Our concern as STHS clinicians was that delays in advanced imaging resulted in prolonged opioid exposure, increased expenses for conservative treatments, as well as quality-of-life disruptions due to the inability of the orthopedic surgeon having access to the imaging valuable to providing the proper diagnosis,” said Bert Lindsey, director of the health system’s Inpatient Physical Therapy Department and a champion of MSKUS as a diagnostic tool. “MSKUS changes all that.”
Already widely used in Europe and Asia, MSKUS has only just begun to catch on in the United States. With financial assistance from St. Tammany Hospital Foundation, the health system’s Physical Therapy team introduced it to St. Tammany in 2019, including at its Therapy and Wellness Clinic in Covington.
It is now in the process of having every full-time physical therapist on staff pass the rigorous national exam to become certified in the procedure.
The implications are huge, Lindsey said.
“We’re talking real-time imaging for school athletes, weekend warriors and patients experiencing joint pain that will reduce opioid exposure and give patients peace of mind,” he said. “Having so many clinicians able to perform this low-cost diagnostic within one community is a first in our nation, and St Tammany Health System is responsible for making it happen.”
Whether you’ve got a question to ask or an appointment to keep, getting in touch with us is a cinch. Here’s everything you need to know:
1 N. Azalea Drive
Covington, LA 70433
Ph: 985-892-4622
7 a.m. to 6 p.m. | Monday - Friday
201 St. Ann Drive, Suite B
Mandeville, LA 70471
Ph: 985-898-4001
8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday (call for evening hours)
71211 Highway 21,
Covington, LA 70433
Ph: 985-773-1494
Monday - Thursday | 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Fridays | 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.
71256 Francis Road
Covington, LA 70433
Ph: 985-871-5899
7 a.m. to 5 p.m. | Mon, Wed, Thurs and Fri
8 a.m. to 12 p.m. | Tue and Fri
17240 Heartbeat Circle
Covington, LA 70435
Ph: 985-867-3065
8 a.m. to 5 p.m. | Monday through Friday (call for evening hours)
2647 N Causeway Blvd., Ste. 100A
Mandeville, LA 70471
Ph: 985-705-5330
7 a.m. to 5 p.m. | Monday through Thursday
7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. | Friday
St. Tammany Health System's orthopedic programs have earned recognition from groups including:
