Fourth Year - Rotation One - Evidence Based Practice STARES

Situation:
Every Monday afternoon after lunch, all the physios at this hospital gather for an hour of personal development. Previously this has consisted of pool safety emergency procedures; reviewing interesting case studies presented on the ward or in outpatients; learning about new/unusual surgical procedures; and being presented with new research/ideas learnt about in recently attended conferences. Each week there is a physio rostered on to discuss/present a topic of their choosing. In the final week of this placement, I was asked to present to the physio team about a topic of my choice.

Task:
To find a topic and locate current research using the resources available to me to present an interesting topic to further enhance the knowledge of my colleagues.

Action:
I chose the topic of Iatrogenic (drug induced) Parkinsonism. During the first week of my placement, one of the physios on the medical ward reported seeing a patient presenting with Parkinson like symptoms such as festinating gait, decreased balance, slow movements and a very flexed posture. As the physio looking after this patient was previously a ND student also, we remembered a case study Ali gave us in our 3rd year Neuro-anatomy assignment. It involved a young man with a schizo-affective disorder on anti-psychotic medication who developed Parkinson’s symptoms. I was able to get in touch with Ali about the patient/case study but found that I wanted to know more about the drugs which caused these symptoms. I discussed this topic with my supervisor who agreed it was an interesting topic that she knew little about. I started by searching Notre Dame’s eLibrary databases (PubMed, Pedro) for articles. Unfortunately, I found this topic lacking material and decided to add a revision of Parkinson’s disease as an aspect of my presentation. I revised my neurology lectures from 3rd year, researched articles about current management of Parkinson’s and physiotherapy and also investigated into drug induced Parkinsonism. I put all the information into a PowerPoint presentation to make my talk more interesting with pictures and dot points.

Result:
The result was an hour long presentation revising the pathophysiology of Parkinson ’s disease as well as specifically looking into iatrogenic Parkinson’s. I then followed up with discussing the current management of Parkinson’s including drug therapy, surgery and physiotherapy management. This topic was not only good revision for my fellow colleagues but the majority of them had never heard of drug-induced Parkinson’s before and were quite surprised by the commonly known drugs that could cause such effects. My presentation then initiated further discussions on treatments for Parkinson’s and also previous patient cases were bought up.

Evaluation:
I started thinking about and working on the presentation since my third week on prac but only got it finished the night before. This was mainly due to changing my topic to focus on Parkinson’s Disease rather than Iatrogenic Parkinson’s and also the presentation of pictures and information in PowerPoint. During the speech/presentation I became quite nervous with my public speaking and got tongue tied initially. I improved throughout the presentation as I saw that the audience was taking an interest in what I was saying. My strengths included knowing the information I was presenting quite well and able to discuss/answer questions thrown at me. The presentation on PowerPoint look good as I was able to obtain pictures and highlight key information to illustrate the points I was talking about. I was able to summarise the articles I read and share current research/ideas about Parkinson’s with my physio team so if confronted with a patient with this condition they will have the most up-to-date treatment ideas. With the articles, I did refer to them but did not print out copies of them for the department which I will do next time. I also hopefully will finish the presentation earlier and send it off to a lecturer at the uni to check over.

Strategies:
Use up to date articles
Start researching early!
Get in touch with the appropriate lecturer
Make sure there’s enough information about the topic you choose to fill up an hour!
With PowerPoint, use lots of pictures to keep the audience interested
Don’t stress!
Know your information well so you can answer questions about the topic at the end!