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The Role of Podiatry With Football Teams

One of the more favorite sports activities in Australia is Australian Rules Football (AFL). To those outside Australia it is considered considerably weird because they have seen no sport like it, but they are in awe of just what incredible sports athletes that those who take part in the game at the professional elite level are. This is a fully professional men’s competition of Australian rules football and has now been competed for over a hundred years. It began in the state of Victoria, but now some other states have teams in what is now viewed as a national competition. The eighteen professional clubs that play in the AFL invest greatly in the sports sciences as well as sports medicine to get the most out of the players in every club. The sports medicine staff with each team includes a podiatrist included to help manage the foot injury and footwear needs of the athletes. The role of Podiatry practitioners in the AFL in Australia is recognized as a model of how podiatrists really should be involved in professional teams worldwide.

For one of the episodes of the podiatry related livestream, PodChatLive the hosts spoke with five of the podiatry practitioners associated with AFL squads to discuss the world leading template for Podiatry inside an professional sports league and the growing role of the recently formed, AFL Podiatry Association. The Podiatry practitioners that were on this livestream ended up Ben Holland with the North Melbourne Kangaroos, Emma Poynton with the Western Bulldogs, Nicki Quigley with the Hawthorn Hawks, Todd Brown with the Geelong Cats and Tom May from the Adelaide Crows. They discussed the requirements of AFL and just how this affects the athletes and what the frequent injuries observed. There was a great discussion concerning the footwear used and also the problems that brings. There was additionally a conversation of the preseason screening process process that is normally followed in the 44-man teams. The episode was sent out live on Facebook, but is also available these days on YouTube.

Why is a vascular assessment of the feet so important?

One of the most valuable jobs which a podiatrist takes on will be to appraise the vascular or blood flow status to the feet and lower limb to find out if people are vulnerable or not for inadequate healing a result of the supply of blood. If a person was at high risk for issues because of that, then measures really need to be undertaken to reduce that risk and protect the feet from damage, particularly if they also have diabetes mellitus. The weekly talk show for Podiatry practitioners, PodChatLive devoted a complete stream to that issue. PodChatLive is a free continuing education stream which goes live on Facebook. The expected market is podiatry practitioners employed in clinical practice, however the real market extend to plenty of other health care professionals too. Throughout the livestream there is a lot of discussion and feedback on Facebook. Later on the edited video version is added to YouTube and the podcast version is put onto the usual sites like Spotify and also iTunes.

In the show on vascular complications and examination of the feet the hosts chatted with Peta Tehan, a podiatrist, and an academic at the University of Newcastle, Australia and with Martin Fox who is also a podiatrist and works in a CCG-commissioned, community-based National Health Service service in Manchester where he offers early identification, analysis and ideal clinical management of people with diagnosed peripheral vascular disease. Through the episode there were several real and helpful vascular gems from Martin and Peta. They brought up what a vascular evaluation may need to look like in clinical practice, the importance of doppler use for a vascular examination (and prevalent mistakes made), we listened to some doppler waveforms live (and recognize how counting on our ears alone is probably not perfect), and recognized the need for great history taking and screening in people who have identified risk factors, particularly considering that 50% of people with peripheral arterial disorders have no symptoms.