Clinical physiotherapist Soroya Simmons, 29, has been instrumental in setting up a rehabilitation centre at Mabaruma Regional Hospital in Region One (Barima/Waini) and a physiotherapy gym at Supply Health Centre, East Bank Demerara as she follows her passion to heal people through physical therapy.
Under Simmons’ watch, Supply Health Centre’s Rehabilitation Department also now offers occupational therapy, speech and audiology services from the start of 2025.
“I like the clinical aspect of physiotherapy, especially the post-surgical interventions. Physical therapy is not just helping people to recover but it is to convince them to do the therapies they don’t want to do to help themselves recover. It’s very rewarding for them and for me to see someone who was doubting himself and lying in bed for many weeks and months, to a few months later, walking around and cooking his own meals again,” Simmons said in a recent interview at her Eccles, East Bank Demerara home.
Simmons is the physiotherapist in charge of the rehabilitation department of Supply Health Centre and took up her role there after serving for over a year in Region One. She was stationed at Mabaruma Regional Hospital from 2021 to 2022.
When she was assigned to the Supply Health Centre Rehabilitation Department, she immediately saw some of the deficiencies.
“First, we did sensitisation with the doctors because we can’t see patients without the doctors’ referrals. I was working with another physiotherapist at that time, and we did outreaches to the East Bank Demerara health centres at Grove, Craig, Soesdyke, Timehri and Kuru Kururu,” she said.
“We told the staff what physiotherapy is, who needs physiotherapy and the process to refer a patient. Once the doctors were aware of what we were doing, we started to get more patients.” The department also received referrals from the Diamond area, Hillfoot, Kuru Kuru, Yarrowkabra and Waiakabra.
“We see a lot of the same ailments we saw in Mabaruma but the difference here is we see a lot more of the effects of non-communicable diseases such as amputations due to diabetes, hypertension and a few heart cases,” she related.
At Supply Health Centre she gained an interest in community health and wellness, especially for the older population.
“I really like working with the older folks. I started a few cardiac rehab courses that I’m interested in. Also, a lot of people do not know they are diabetic until it is too late, and they must lose a limb. That has put me more on a path of interest to follow at the master’s degree level. Now I know where I want to go, I’m looking at application dates to open again. When I first started working as a physiotherapist, cardiac rehab scared me because you can’t let the cardiac patient exercise too much. It’s funny how the thing that scared me the most is what I ended up coming back to,” she said.
She has a history of working the Covid-19 ward at the Georgetown Public Hospital and later, the Infectious Diseases Hospital, Liliendaal where she saw the long-term effects of Covid-19 and how it had compounded heart problems especially among the early diabetes and hypertension among the younger population.
“We try to do a lot of patient education on non-communicable diseases and on lifestyle change and life-style management,” she said.
While many associate massages with physical therapy, she said massages are the least often used clinically. Its specific purpose is for relaxation. Massages would not help with a fracture, a back pain or muscle spasm.
“We focus a lot on exercise therapy, movements, stretching, strength training and cardio training for some of our patients who have heart problems or circulation issues. We have regular group sessions with our stroke/neurology groups. We get a lot of stroke patients from the East Bank Demerara and the Linden-Soesdyke Highway,” she added.
Simmons is also trained in dry needling and taping. Dry needling involves using an acupuncture needle inserted in an injured muscle or tendon to provide relief to patients.
“We mostly see taping on athletes but not just athletes benefit from taping but the ordinary man with a rotator cuff injury, an injured shoulder or injured knee,” she said.
At Supply, she advocated relentlessly for an extension to the health centre because the department was taking up about half of the space of the centre with the number of patients it was treating.
Supply Health Centre officially opened a new physical therapy gym in December 2024.
Covid-19 ICU
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the physiotherapy programme at the University of Guyana in 2018, Simmons did short rotations at most of the clinics in Georgetown.
In 2019, she started her first quarterly rotation under supervision at West Demerara Regional Hospital with clinical and inpatient care. She was then assigned to Ptolemy Reid Rehabilitation Centre for paediatric interventions, followed by another three months at the Palms Rehabilitation Centre’s neurology clinic where patients with strokes, spinal cord injuries or brain or Parkinson’s disease are treated.
She ended the year at the Guyana Public Hospital dealing with inpatient care. Before she could be assigned an out-of-town location for a year in 2020, the deadly Covid-19 came on the scene.
Simmons recalled, “We stopped seeing patients. The authorities were trying to keep the hospital load as low as possible to avoid catching and spreading the virus. Physiotherapists weren’t considered essential staff at that point in time which was crazy considering the amount of work we did in the Intensive Care Unit. Then we were pulled in. We started to see more research on how breathing therapy and movement were good for the recovery of Covid-19 patients. Covid-19 was so new that we tried anything that looked like it was working.”
Simmons was in the second batch of physiotherapists to receive training to work in the Covid-19 ICU.
“We walked patients who could walk, took them through breathing exercises, used clearing techniques to move mucus and helped to drain secretions from people’s lungs. It was a lot of work,” she said.
“The number of protocols and procedures to follow to get into the Covid-19 ICU and the number of PPEs [Personal Protective Equipment] training I did over those two years, it is ingrained in me to wash my hands a specific way.”
She was used to touching her face and biting her fingernails and Covid-19 broke those habits.
Was she scared? “Yeah. I have a deep respect and fear of Covid to this day. Working in the Covid-19 ICU we saw how quickly the virus brought down the body. The scariest part was that it had no respect for anyone. Some people came in one day, we worked with them, they felt good and the next day, something happened, and they were gone. That was rough. The cleaning protocol kept us safe,” she said.
While she was in the heart of Covid-19 she was not infected.
“I got Covid in 2022 when I went to Region One. All the time when I was in the heart of it in 2020 and 2021, I didn’t catch it,” she said.
Mabaruma
Once Covid-19 started easing, the out-of-town rotations restarted.
The Ministry of Health has rehabilitation departments in the ten regions, but not all regions had physiotherapists. Some had rehabilitation assistants who were trained in some aspects of occupational therapy, speech and physical therapy.
Simmons was the first trained physiotherapist assigned to Region One. She chose Region One because of her childhood connection to it. Simmons was born in Georgetown and received her nursery, primary and junior secondary education at Marian Academy. She spent a year in Lower Six at Queen’s College before enrolling at the University of Guyana.
“When I got to Mabaruma we didn’t have a department. The department’s physical space was converted to the Covid-19 headquarters and the rehab assistant was absorbed into the Covid-19 squad. We had to take her back along with the space for the department. That was the start of the reopening of the department,” she said.
Simmons had taken some basic equipment to restart work in the department and requested several other basics like bands, weights and beds. As work got underway, and she saw the need for more equipment, she asked for them. Working at Georgetown Hospital gave her a good idea of what was needed.
“That was the most advocating I had to do for physical therapy. I had become a professional beggar for the department. In Region One, very few knew about the benefits of physical therapy. We had to sell it to people and even to some of the doctors who weren’t fully aware about what physical therapy could do for their patients. For the first month, we weren’t getting referrals to treat patients,” she said.
With the doctors’ approval she listened in to patients’ complaints and offered to help where necessary. “When I saw a patient coming back two or three times with a shoulder pain, I said, ‘Hey, that is something physical therapy could help. Just send them over and let me see how I could help them.’ That was how the department started to get patients and people outside of the hospital started to learn about physical therapy,” she said.
Common ailments were mostly back and shoulder pain and working injuries related to falls, fractures and lacerations.
Region One has three rehabilitation departments, one each at Mabaruma Regional Hospital, Port Kaituma District Hospital and Kumaka District Hospital in Moruca, for which Simmons had oversight.
At the centres in Port Kaituma and Moruca she focused on staff development.
“I wasn’t long enough in Port Kaituma and Moruca to do my work there, so I focused on imparting my skills to the rehab assistants. It was more effective to teach them to enhance their skills and help patients,” she said.
One of the staff she worked with at Mabaruma is now undergoing training on the rehabilitation programme in Georgetown. “I was pushing her to do that,” she said.
At Mabaruma, Simmons joined the medical outreaches to Yarakita, Whitewater, Imbotero and Hobodiah among other places.
“I spent a year and a couple of months in Mabaruma and I was pleased with the work I did. I was happy the department was better equipped when I left. It could do with more growing. People got to know us and trusted us. I wasn’t only getting patients from Mabaruma but I had patients who came in once a month from the rivers and outlying areas who we met during outreaches,” she said.
At Mabaruma, Simmons also volunteered as a medical liaison with the local United Nations Development Programme team that dealt with the migrants, mainly Warraus crossing the border from Venezuela to Guyana.
“We saw a lot of Venezuelan patients who needed vaccines, medical and other assistance before they continued to other places,” she said.
On a lighter note, Simmons noted that Guyana is a beautiful place.
“Some of the places I visited, these little creeks I swam in and the little falls I saw were only possible because of having the government’s means of transportation moving us around while doing outreaches because it would’ve been very expensive if I were to try to do that on my own. I was with the team that went to Baramita to check on the hospital as it was being built,” she said.
“In the Barima River we saw where they processed the heart of palm for export. Though unrelated to my work, it was fascinating to me. Here is this whole business, this industry that most Guyanese don’t know about, because it is not even a product that we use. I was so tickled by that.”
On her return from Mabaruma to the GPHC, Simmons said, “That to me felt like a good break because it was rough being in charge, having to make decisions and having to push to get things done. It was just fine being a part of the system again.”
That break was not for long because she was then reassigned to Supply.
Tribute to Janice Simmons
Simmons was a national swimmer specialising in the back stroke and distance swimming. She held many backstroke records for several years before they were all broken. She was Guyana’s first and only national swimmer to date to medal at Trinidad and Tobago’s International Invitational Open Water Swim Meet at Maracas Bay placing third and fourth in the 2,560 metres and the 5,000 metres female open category, respectively.
As a swimmer she had experienced shin splints during cross training and was treated by her grandmother, the late Janice Simmons who was the first Guyanese trained physiotherapist.
“She set up a lot of the departments at the GPHC, the Palms and in other parts of coastal Guyana. After she heard me complaining about my shin and knee pains, she told me to meet her at Ptolemy Reid Rehabilitation Centre. I remember the ultrasound and the exercises she put me through and the pains disappeared. She advised me about the pains in my shoulder. As a swimmer shoulder injury was common. So, I was a physiotherapy patient,” she said.
Simmons was happy that her grandmother attended her graduation ceremony, but she did not get to see her practising her skills as she died shortly after.
“I get a lot of reminders about her at work from colleagues or patients. Sometimes I get reminders from myself when I do something that is very Janice Simmons. Like I’d be singing in the middle of treatments and that was Janice Simmons. Like some of the jokes she made with me and some of the jokes I make with patients,” she said.
“Even the staff who have been in the system longer than I have been alive, every now and again remind me that I might do something that would emit a remark like, ‘That is a Janice Simmons move or that is something Janice Simmons would say.’ She is certainly still here.”
The prosthetics and orthotics department of the Ptolemy Reid Rehabilitation Centre was named after Janice Simmons and Simmons, during her first year as a physiotherapist, had the honour of unveiling the plaque naming the Janice Simmons Prosthetics and Orthotics Department.
An incident that surprised her was when a patient Simmons was assessing at Supply asked her if she knew Janice Simmons and if she was Soroya Simmons.
“I said, ‘Yes, that’s me.’ He looked at me. I was nervous for a second and then he said, ‘I’m glad I get you. I heard good things about you and the department’.”
