Scholars Therapies: Covid-19 Lockdown review and looking forward to our ‘new normal’

01 Aug Scholars Therapies: Covid-19 Lockdown review and looking forward to our ‘new normal’

We announced a few weeks ago that our New Website is now up and running and to go along with our new site, we are also going to be doing regular blogs to update you on our current developments, educational content and much more. Our blogs will be written by Gareth, unless stated otherwise, so please direct any questions (and criticisms) to him!

I thought I would start by giving you an overview of what I have been up to since we had to close our doors in March in compliance with The Government Guidelines. I was down in Wales at the time, waiting for confirmation of a friend of mine’s wedding was going ahead (it didn’t in the end, I could write a whole blog about that!). The Government announcement on the 20th March 2020 was an absolute hammer blow. By then we had yet to see the devastation that has come along with COVID-19. My first thought was….. I have 100 patients/clients that need to be told not to come for their appointment next week. The next few days were really difficult for me. I feared I was going to lose everything I had worked so hard to build over the past 3 years. I must admit I was overwhelmed by the support received during this time and I will be forever grateful. This fear and negativity didn’t last too long…. Those who know me, know I am a very upbeat and positive person, so I set about creating a plan of attack on what I could do during the lockdown period to ensure I came out of it in the best state possible. I made the decision that this was the perfect time to invest in the infrastructure of the business and some other professional related tasks (more about these later). First and foremost, I thought it was a great opportunity to enjoy more family time with my very patient wife Louise and my amazing son Jack. It has been great to spend so much time together as a family, something we haven’t always had due to my busy work schedule. We have had lots of walks with Jack in the ‘JackPack’, family days out, garden fun during that period of amazing weather! These memories will last forever! We also managed to take the time to complete potty training!

Moving on to the business and professional side of things. At the start of lockdown, I reviewed the business and set about planning what we could realistically get done during the lockdown period to help the business during lockdown and beyond.

• Develop an Online Consultation Service
• New Website – our previous website had originally been built 5 years ago, so it was due a refresh
• Upgrading our clinic management system to Sports Injury Fix
• Upgrading our exercise prescription software

I have also become an Accredited Compex Practitioner and teamed up with RP-X Team to provide cutting edge equipment to enhance our service.

Professionally, there has been several things mainly linking to Continuous Professional Development (CPD) that I wanted to complete for months (some things even years!!) so I set a to do list that consisted of:

• Submit a previous case study for publication. I had done the majority of the work on this back in 2017 and it had been on my list of things to do since then! The case study has passed the initial process and was passed to reviewers for their comments. These comments have been actioned and the case study is back with the reviewers in the hope of getting published before the end of the year. This case study is an extremely rare condition, with a very limited evidence base for clinicians to utilise so I am delighted to be adding to the existing pool (hopefully – fingers crossed).
• Complete Erik Meira’s Knee Course. I have been meaning to get to his weekend courses for years, but I discovered he has moved them online and this gave me the perfect opportunity to attend his course. It has given me so many new ideas and rehabilitation strategies. I can’t wait to try these out!
• Multiple Free Online CPD events such as Sports MAP Network Webinars and the infamous Therapy Live Event.

Next week we re-open our doors at All Seasons Leisure Centre and we can not wait to be back! It’s been a very testing and uncertain period, which hopefully is starting to settle down into some degree of our ‘New Normal’.

Thanks for reading!

Best Wishes

Gareth