Damilola Gbolahan

 

Damilola has a Master’s Degree in Sports and Exercise Medicine from Manchester Metropolitan University and almost a decade of experience managing musculoskeletal and sports-related injuries in private practices as well as the public health systems of the United Kingdom and Nigeria. She is also an MSK First Contact Physiotherapist and a Chronic Pain Specialist.

 

In her various roles she has provided the whole range of sports injury-related physiotherapy: from pitch-side and track and field emergency response to post-surgery and return-to-sport rehabilitation.

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As the head of the rehabilitation department in a big teaching hospital, she learned how to foster multidisciplinary collaboration with other medical professionals to achieve the best outcomes for patients.

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Damilola has completed the Advanced Trauma Medical Management in Football (FA Level 5) training, and working with football players has helped her understand the need to ensure that the rehabilitative process is personalised to the athlete’s needs. Professional footballers are under immense pressure to perform at their peak consistently and depend on their physiotherapist to help them avoid or recover from injuries. This was further highlighted when she worked with Nigeria’s Special Olympics team, which required her to adapt her practice to help athletes living with disabilities to recover from injuries and resume their sports as soon as possible. “Due to the psychological pressure that injuries cause for professional as well as recreational sportspeople, I use a biopsychosocial approach to ensure that recovery is as timely and safe as possible without the athletes pushing themselves beyond the limits of their abilities,” says Damilola.

 

An example of her holistic approach is when a semi-professional football player who had had knee surgery contracted COVID-19 just before Damilola was about to start with his rehab program and was hospitalised for two weeks. “After his discharge, he was really deconditioned. For his rehabilitation, we did not just focus on his knee, but also on retraining his cardiovascular endurance, balance and coordination, strength and conditioning, and finally return to sport. His main goal was to return to football, but we also set various short-term goals to enable us to achieve the long-term goal.”