A team of committed individuals with a very wide variety of clinical and educational experience.
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Introduction
UPDATE: A new Comprehensive Spinal Cord Injury Programme has replaced this old SCI programme. Follow this link to start the courses in the Comprehensive Spinal Cord Injury Programme.
Spinal Cord Injury refers to any damage to the spinal cord resulting from trauma, disease or degeneration with symptoms dependant on both the severity of injury and its location on the spinal cord. According to the World Health Organisation there is no reliable estimate of global prevalence of spinal cord injury, but it is estimated that annual global incidence varies from 40 to 80 cases per million population, which means between 250,000 to 500,000 people acquire a spinal cord injury every year. Approximately 90% of these cases occur as a result of traumatic causes, though the proportion of non-traumatic spinal cord injury appears to be growing. This course will focus on developing an understanding of spinal cord injury; what it is, what causes it, how often it occurs, what you might expect to see, the impacts it has on movement and what other associated conditions may occur. We need to be able to answer these questions in order to understand our role as physiotherapists in the management of spinal cord injury.
Aims
The aim of this course is to provide comprehensive knowledge of spinal cord anatomy, clinical presentations and to examine both local and global prevalence.
Outline
This course is made up of videos, reading, forum posts and a final quiz. The course content is split into the following sections:
- Spinal Cord Structure and Function
- Epidemiology, Incidence and Global Burden of Spinal Cord Injury
- Understanding Spinal Cord Injury
- Associated Conditions and Medical Complications
Target audience
This course is aimed at Physiotherapy and Physical Therapy clinicians, students and assistants. Other interested professionals such as athletic trainers, occupational therapists, nurses or medical doctors interested in this subject are also invited to participate.