Being the members of the organization switch India when I saw the message to volunteer to give a talk on “knee pain causes and management”, two Switch Members Dr. Priyanka Joshi practicing at Bombay Hospital & Dr. Albertina Nazareth doing her Neuro Masters at KEM Hospital, Mumbai thought it would be a great opportunity to express themselves and to educate the common people about a topic which we are all well acquainted with.
With the confirmation from these members to volunteer for this online awareness talk, a message was released over WhatsApp in English and Hindi to inform the general population about the upcoming talk.
Anjali Alhan, one of our attendees, a chemistry Hons. graduate from the University of Delhi also came through a post of an online webinar on knee pain and its management. She says, “I found this topic so useful as my mother is also suffering from knee pain from few months but she never considered it as an illness.”
Soon Dr. Priyanka and Dr. Albertina discussed the same and decided on the content to speak on for the interview as well. They said, “Once we both got the confirmation, we were excited since this was the first time we were doing something like this and also the fact that we both were doing it together.
With a lot of zeal and thrill, we started to make the presentation, going through articles for our literature review, making sure all the facts were fully proofed. We went back to our textbooks to brush up the basics so we could make this as simple as possible.“
Dr. Albertina and Dr. Priyanka added, “We made the first draft of the PPT and had a mock presentation; being medicos we had presented one with a lot of medical terms and explanations.
Post valuable feedback from the members, we realized it was difficult to understand for the common people. With corrections and using more illustrations, making it easier to understand the exercises and changes to changing the language in which we spoke, we made the final one. On the last mock call Saturday night, with the insightful inputs from the members, we were finally ready.”
On Sunday 14th June 2020, the talk was scheduled at 3.00 pm over Free Conference Call App. Both speakers said they were anxious and eager to do this. They had decided their sections to speak on and were all set to reach out and conduct this webinar and make it a success.
The webinar was hosted by Truptee Parekh & Deep Sagar, the Awareness Cell Heads on the board of Switch India Committee. Anjali Alhan, one of our participants kindly mentioned in her article that, “Every important information related to the webinar was shared on particular WhatsApp group.
Organizers sent the tutorials on how to attend the webinar and other information. The webinar started on time and I didn’t face any technical glitch during the webinar. I was not expecting such a huge crowd but there were approximately 80-90 participants online.
Dr. Priyanka started a webinar with enthusiasm and firstly she explained about structure of the knee followed by causes of knee pain in layman language because every participant can understand the terms. The ice and compression management technique was completely new for me.
I never considered obesity as a problem but now it seems like a list of health risks is linked to obesity and keeps growing. knee bear approximately 80% of our body weight when we are standing and the knee is something without which you can not live freely open to the public.
Coming to the exercise on knee care in obesity she explained about the exercise that one should avoid, aerobics we can follow, and few low impact exercises.
Each exercise was explained deeply considering the proper posture and repetition to follow. Osteoarthritis was the term I haven’t come across in my life but the explanation by Dr. Albertina made it easy for me to understand. She explained the exercise including the proper posture for exercise. The webinar was followed by a doubt session, the queries of all the patients were answered.“
Everything went well as per the mock sessions until there was some technological error due to which Priyanka was locked out, despite trying by various means she couldn’t log in again and resume for the second half of her talk and that made the entire Webinar team nervous of the scenario.
After realizing the situation as Dr. Albertina was well versed in the content she decided to continue. Thanks to their practice sessions that the entire presentation went great despite the hurdles. After the presentation, there was a 15 mins dedicated session in which the attendees were free to ask their queries to which they answered and there was a lot of clarification made for their doubts.
Both the speakers said, “After getting the feedback from the attendees we were happy that we could make a positive difference. We are thankful to switch India for this opportunity, grateful to the organizer’s Trustee, Deep, and Vidhi with who’s timely co-ordination and co-operation we could conduct it so efficiently.”
Even our session participant Anjali gave very positive feedback saying, ” I often watch online videos but never got this much information in a systematic way by professionals. I found it very thoughtful while filling the feedback form as they asked the suggestions for the next topic. This was a beneficent move by Switch India.”
