Dr. Smith is the owner of the physical therapy company, which has offices in St. Thomas and in Road Town. He plans to open another office on Virgin Gorda in early August, and one in St. Croix within the next eight months.
We provide various rehabilitation services to persons in the community: Varying conditions orthopaedic in nature – so bone, muscle, joint type of impairments — neurological conditions: head injuries, strokes, spinal cord injuries — and then all the physical limitations like difficulties walking, getting out of bed, getting in and out of cars. Those kind of things.
Talk about your decision to expand from the United States Virgin Islands into this territory.
We’ve been in the BVI since 2012. My entire family is from the BVI, and I’m the first generation to be born in the USVI. I’ve always had a strong connection to the BVI, and have been keeping track of what’s going on here. It always seemed too difficult to do business here – the distance and travel back and forth – so I wasn’t very interested in it until I started having a number of patients come from Tortola to St. Thomas. I felt bad for those persons because it was such a struggle. They already had the problem that they had, which makes it very difficult to travel, and they’d make the effort to come and see me. I’d ask them why they’d come and see me, and they’d say, “Well, I tried the folks on Tortola and haven’t been getting the results I wanted.” With all my parents and grandparents aging, I felt an obligation to come. I always thought the insurance and business side would be difficult to overcome, but when I started looking into it, the system is actually almost the same.
What kind of clientele do you attract?
It is a combination. The vast majority of patients are usually between 35 and 70, the majority being females. It is usually a working class person who comes with overuse-type injuries in general. There are three groups of people: We would see current injuries that are chronic in nature but untreated; another one would be truly chronic injuries treated in the past but treated poorly. We sometimes see patients who had surgeries with no rehabilitation at all. Since we have such a vibrant track-and-field community, we also see a number of those athletes.
Does your clientele in the USVI differ from that in the BVI?
We have far more athletes here because of track. On St. Thomas, there aren’t very good facilities. Once folks are out of school, you don’t see people participating as much in organised sports. The higher-level training you have here, the coaches who know what should be done when an injury happens: That transitions into them pointing to us for care.
How’d you get interested in physical therapy?
Initially, my route was to work hospital physiotherapy. When I was enrolled in Howard University’s pre-physiotherapy programme and was in one of my summer internships, two of my patients died. I knew those people very well and worked with them for a number of weeks before they passed. It really affected me negatively and made me not want to be in that environment anymore. The fall semester after that, I ended up communicating with the guy who’s now the president of the Olympic Committee in the USVI, and he suggested to go into sports medicine. I actually had no idea what that was. When I played high school sports, there was never an athletic trainer or physio on site. Unfortunately, that environment still persists in the USVI and the BVI, where the folks organising sports don’t see fit to also plan to have medical personnel there. It creates an unsafe environment. After doing some research, I found Barry University in Miami, where I earned my bachelor’s, and it took off from there.
What are your long-term goals for your business?
I’m hoping and optimistic – with the National Health Insurance coming onboard and its focus on wellness – to do a facility that’s truly focused on wellness. Right now we have facilities that say they’re wellness centres, but they’re really gyms. They don’t provide the wide array of services that a wellness centre should do. My goal is to offer that. We also hope to open another facility in St. Croix within the next eight months. We also want to add occupational therapy and speech, which are very, very much needed.
Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Ken Silva.
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