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Podiatry Awards
The Cosyfeet Podiatry Award was created to support podiatry students or qualified podiatrists with projects that develop their professional knowledge and skills while benefiting others.
Former winners have undertaken a wide range of initiatives including those relating to the podiatric needs of dementia sufferers, the diabetic foot and the treatment of talipes equinovarus in children. Others have travelled to Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia or South America to assist with conditions resulting from diseases such as leprosy and filariasis.
Podiatry Award 2019
Michael Hutchby, a second-year doctoral student in Health and Social Care at the University of Derby, is the proud winner of the Cosyfeet Podiatry Award 2019.
The Cosyfeet Podiatry Award assists podiatrists and podiatry students to develop their professional knowledge and skills while benefitting others. The award is open to those who are planning voluntary work, a work placement or research, whether in the UK or abroad. The £1000 award will fund IT support for his research, which will compare two different saphenous nerve block techniques for day-case ambulatory podiatric surgical correction of hallux valgus.
Michael’s research will take the form of a Randomised Control Trial (RCT). It will investigate whether an increased period of post-operative analgesia can be obtained by applying a saphenous nerve block just above the knee rather than at the ankle. It will also investigate whether such an increase in post-operative analgesia reduces the need for post-operative opioids and improves the patient surgical journey.
Due to the addictive nature of opioids, it has been suggested that as many as 9.5% of post surgical patients prescribed post-operative opioids go on to abuse this class of drug. A number of academic papers have pointed towards a change in the location of podiatric anaesthesia from the ankle to the knee being key to reducing the need for post-operative opioids in podiatric surgical patients. Michael hopes that his research will prove this hypothesis, and so lead to an increased duration of postoperative anaesthesia with a corresponding reduction in the use of postoperative opioid use.
“Michael’s research is pertinent to reducing the concerning incidence of opioid abuse in our society,” says Cosyfeet Managing Director, Andrew Peirce. “We are delighted to support his research and hope that it will give a clear indication as to whether simply applying local anaesthesia at the knee rather than at the ankle could result in a reduction in the numbers of individuals likely to abuse opioids.”