ESPA: EIS Physiotherapists continue their professional development within Paralympic Sport
Development opportunities for English Institute of Sport physiotherapists continued across the 19th and 20th January, as practitioners undertook the Paralympic module of the Elite Sport Physiotherapy Accreditation (ESPA).
Facilitated by Paul Martin, Tom Hignett, Dawn Ibrahim and Jill Crompton, the module is designed to help EIS practitioners apply their understanding of disability and impairment to help maximise athlete performance, as well as helping to improve the confidence of practitioners that may only come into contact with Paralympic athletes in a multisport environment. As well as academic delivery, the weekend was heavily practically based around planning and delivery within real life Paralympic athlete case studies. For the first time on any ESPA course, an EIS Physician and Strength and Conditioning coach attended one day each.
Great weekend sharing knowledge with @eis2win practitioners #eisESPA pic.twitter.com/0kUfHcMl1F
— Tom Hignett (@HignettTom) January 19, 2020
One attendee commented that it was ‘great to work in groups and with the Physiotherapy Technical Leads to explore everyone’s reasoning skills and how they complete the assessment process’, and another remarked that the weekend ‘provided reflective time to review the key areas of physiotherapy to take into daily practice’.
ESPA is an Masters level accredited, practical, contextual problem solving programme designed to support the technical development of practitioners working in elite sport. The Paralympic module is entirely unique in the UK to the course.
“Questioning – the ability to organise our thinking around what we don’t know” – the art of subjective & objective assessment for our para-athletes #eisESPA @eis2win @PaulMartinEIS @HignettTom pic.twitter.com/fRV966rz5K
— Gemma Parry (@GemmaNParry) January 18, 2020