2017 New Year’s Resolutions

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Wishing all of you a belated Happy New Year! I accidently left my laptop in Kansas City, with my parents, so I haven’t been able to finish this post, until now!

 I’m not sure about all of you but after Christmas I usually start thinking about what I would like to change in 2017 to make it a better year. Even though it is a few days past the official New Year, it is not too late to think about and implement your New Year resolutions.

My previous New Year’s resolutions have included everything from weight loss to reading more often. However, this year is a little different. My husband and I are expecting our first child in May! Here he is, Benjamin Patrick Moore! Maybe he will be a speech-language pathologist when he grows up? J


Picking a New Year resolution this year is a bit different because I am focusing on my family! Spending quality time with my family is more of a priority then ever before. I also want to continue to grow as a speech-language pathologist to be the best I can for my patients. So how can I make that happen? I’m going to share my two New Year resolutions with all of you!


First, I want to better my skills as a speech-language pathologist. This year I want to brush up on my Spanish! I found this amazing FREE app called Duolingo. In this app you have the opportunity to pick a language that you are interested in learning. It gives you the opportunity to learn vocabulary and sentence structure receptively and expressively.




My goal is to complete one lesson 3-4times each week. I am pretty excited about this goal because it will help me communicate more efficiently with my patients who speak Spanish. Now of course, I always utilize our wonderful interpreters, but I think learning a different language shows great respect to our patients who are bilingual or who only speak their primary language. I am also pretty excited because I want to try to teach my little Benjamin both Spanish and English! Here is a link to their website: https://www.duolingo.com.


My second goal is to be able to spend more time with my family. By being more efficient at work I hope that this will also alleviate some stress. I believe that organization of my work life is just one of the ways that I can be sure to make that goal a reality.

At my full time job I work in outpatient rehabilitation in a hospital. We currently have electronic medical record and a soft/paper chart for our patients. In outpatient rehabilitation we are responsible for tracking insurance visits, g-codes, progress notes, daily notes, as well as any unique therapy needs our patients may have (such as ordering prosthesis or therapy tools).

In order to help this process I created a 2017 calendar that will go into the paper chart. This calendar will allow for me to have immediate access to pertinent information such as patient contact, insurance, insurance visits, date that progress notes are due, order renewal due date and the contact for physicians. I have used these before and it does take a bit of time in the beginning, but in the long run it is worth it since I do not have to dig through the chart anytime I need to find some information. It is pretty easy to customize your own calendar. I simple entered in “free 2017 calendars” into the search engine and found what I was looking for.

I utilized this this link in order to make my calendar. Just download it into a word document and then you are able to edit to uniquely fit your needs. Here is an example of the calendar I made for work.



What are you New Year resolutions and how do you plan on achieving them?


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