I have been working as a specialist community podiatrist for 3 years. I work with patients in community clinics, their own home, care homes and in hospital. I work with mostly adults, older adults, as well as children.My interest in foot care began with my grandmother, helping to care for her,carrying out basic foot care. I also used to play football and used to work as a sports teacher. When I decided to change careers at the age of 25, I combined both interests and sporting background and retrained at university, as a podiatrist.

I initially completed a BTEC Sport Diploma at college, BA(Hons) Sports Coaching degree, as well as a PGCE in Lifelong Learning to become a teacher, before going back to university to complete a podiatry degree, to retrain as a podiatrist at the University of Huddersfield. My days are flexible and varied, and it is great having a mixture of community clinics and home visits. A typical day would be in clinics (seeing to wound care, nail surgery,biomechanics, or high-risk general foot care), or home visits (wound care,high-risk general foot care). Throughout the day I’ll also re ply to emails and work through my tasks list. Sometimes I attend meetings with other colleagues in the team online or face to face which can be to look at a wide range of things. It could be how we develop the podiatry service, support our professionals and students, to training for staff teams who aren’t podiatrists.Sometimes I might also deliver podiatry training to patient education groups,non-podiatry staff teams, as well as promoting podiatry as a career path at events. Working as a podiatrist in our Trust means that I have a flexible schedule, varied practice, can be autonomous and learn and develop in the areas I’m interested in, as well as being involved in developing the podiatry service. Retraining as a podiatrist has absolutely been the right choice for me, and I would encourage anyone to have a look at the wide variety of allied health professional roles.

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