Physio and OT

When I had my placement, I had come across a situation and I would like to use this opportunity to share with you guys.
In that facility, the physio worked really close with the OT and I would say the job duties were heavily overlapped between these two professions.
It was really cool at the beginning since as a student I could have a chance to see how OT treated patients from their points of view.
Both departments were responsible to prescribe and issue walking aids to patients and both OT and Physio could teach patients on how to use them.
In most situations, the Physio and OT could reach consensus on patient’s mobility and prescribed one walking aid to a patient. However, I had seen a patient using both ‘step-to’ and ‘step through’ gait patterns at the same time when ambulated with crutches; he reported OT and Physio taught different techniques on the same day.
To me, he struggled to ambulate properly with these two gait patterns at the same time, it was unsafe for him to walk like this.
I talked to my supervisor and she agreed with me. During staff meeting, she raised this issue to the OT and both Physio and OT agreed there was a need to review the job duties for each profession in that clinical setting.
I had learnt a valuable lesson in this incident and the take-home message was: If you worked in a multi-disciplinary clinical setting, you had to know other professions well in order to optimize your treatment and utilize the resources wisely.