Pelvic Health Fundamentals: a clinical reasoning course

The Cheerful Academy was designed to bridge the gap between attaining the knowledge and skills from pelvic health courses and integrating them into practice with confidence, clinical competence, and solid reasoning skills,

Our structure and approach were developed from our internal mentorship programs at The Cheerful Pelvis, where we have mentored many clinicians in the pelvic health journey. We know what the gaps are, and we have learned how to help you fill them. We provide a balance between structured frameworks for reasoning and space for coaching to allow participants to move forwards in their own way and at their own pace. Our live cohort learning model leverages community for diversity of insight and transformational learning.

Pelvic Health Essentials is our first external course offering. It is designed to cover all the fundamentals of pelvic health for cis women and people with vulvas. It is designed specifically for physios who have learned how to do pelvic exams, are in their first few years of pelvic floor practice and need help piecing everything together.

We cover pre and post-natal physiotherapy; stress urinary incontinence, over active bladder, urgency, frequency, bowel basics, prolapse and dyspareunia. We do not cover complex pain, trauma, RTUS, or more complex ortho / PF integration in this course - more to come ;)

We provide a clear framework for clinical reasoning and differential diagnosis for the cause of these presenting problems. We offer treatment ideas for these causes then build upon this with common presentations to help participants reason through why A causes B, and why X, Y and Z are often seen together.

This course is designed to take you out of the grey and into a place where you can clearly reason through all the data from an assessment and plan accordingly. It's designed to take you away from guessing or automated treatments and gain clarity on what you know and where to go.

Instructors: Anniken Chadwick and Trish Gipson.

Trish and Anniken have both been practicing in pelvic health for over 10 years. Trish is FCAMPT certified and Anniken has post-grad training in somatic psychotherapy and education. Both have taken Diane Lee's ISM series which hugely influenced their pelvic health practice. Anniken is the owner of The Cheerful Pelvis, where Trish is the Director of Clinical Services.

Trish and Anniken love working together to mentor due to their different ways of learning, thinking, and their different interests within pelvic health. They believe there is no one right way, but that it is so important to reflect on your own tendencies and biases. As a team, Trish and Anniken love helping their mentees find their own way towards excellence in clinical care.

Testimonial

Mentorship with Anniken and Trish has helped me grow significantly as a physiotherapist. As someone newer to pelvic health, it was really easy to fall into autopilot mode and a "check box" approach to treatment when faced with difficult cases. However, mentorship really challenged me to critically think and understand the "why" behind what I was doing. I feel like this has increased my confidence as a physio and the effectiveness of the care I am providing, as well as it has improved how well I connect with my patients. Most importantly, Anniken and Trish have created such a supportive and safe space to be curious, learn, and ask questions (many!)