At Ascenti we are committed to being the best place to work in MSK physiotherapy by supporting our employees to continue to learn and develop throughout their career.
MSK Physiotherapist, Mariana Sousa recently had an article published after completing her Master’s degree in Public Health Nutrition at Coventry University. Here Mariana shares her experience of becoming published and describes the support received from Ascenti.
I joined Ascenti in 2018 as a full-time MSK Physiotherapist and then in 2021 I started my Master’s. Ascenti supported me through this decision by agreeing to change my role to part-time to ensure my work performance wasn’t affected and to allow me to focus on my studies.
I completed my Master’s in Public Health Nutrition at Coventry University where I learnt copious amounts about different UK guidelines and how to create interventions to improve community outcomes. I chose this course as I developed a big interest in how we can prevent chronic diseases with lifestyle changes.
My dissertation was about exploring if physiotherapists’ lifestyle behaviours impact their advice to patients. I decided upon this topic as I had a huge interest in this area and found there to be a lack of research on this topic, therefore I wanted my research to fill the gap in this literature.
As soon as I started my dissertation proposal, my goal was to have it published. To reach this goal I worked endlessly to ensure my dissertation was of excellent standard, enabling it to be a good quality publication. If you would like to read my published article you can find it here.
I experienced support from Ascenti all throughout my Master’s - from allowing me to change to a part-time role, to giving me permission to use Ascenti physios as my participants in my research.
Completing my Master’s has given me knowledge about nutrition and health that I can pass on to my peers as I believe physiotherapists should have a holistic approach and some basic understanding regarding lifestyle modifications, including nutrition.
For anyone interested in having an article published, my advice would be to ensure you publish your work in a relevant journal; my suggestion would be Cureus as it is a journal that accepts a broad range of medical topics.
