PodChatLive is a monthly livestream for the regular expert development of Podiatry practitioners and other people that will be interested. It is hosted by Ian Griffiths from England in the UK and Craig Payne from Melbourne in Australia. They stream online each show live to Facebook and then is eventually modified and published to YouTube so that it does get to a broad audience. Every live show has a different guest or number of people to go over a particular topic of interest each time. Queries and comments usually are responded to live by the hosts and guests whilst in the live episode on Facebook. There is not very much follow-up conversation with the YouTube channel. For those who like audio only, there's a PodCast version of every single show on iTunes as well as Spotify and the other common podcast platforms for that intent. They've got attained a big following which continues getting bigger. PodChatLive can be considered one of several ways in which podiatrists can usually get free professional education points.
One of the episodes that was popular was a conversation with a couple of foot orthotic lab owners concerning the market and just how they connect with the podiatry professions. Foot orthotics facilities are in the business of manufacturing custom made foot orthotics which Podiatrists use for the clients. The lab owners in that stream were Artur Maliszewski (from the Footwork Podiatric Laboratory in Melbourne, Australia) and Martin McGeough (from Firefly Orthoses in Ireland). Craig and ian talked about what life is like at the orthoses facilities. They talked briefly about how they personally made the journey from graduating Podiatry practitioners to laboratory owners as well as other themes like their labs involvement in research. There was additionally a very helpful conversation on the preferences of their clients with regards to negative impression casting methods including the plaster of paris vs optical mapping. Also of concern was the number of people even now wish to use the infamous “lab discretion” tick on orthotic prescriptions.