Every day during September we will post up an idea for you to vote on. The most popular ideas will become the things that the inaugural Organizing Committee of the Critical Physiotherapy Network focuses on in 2015. So please make sure you cast your vote at the bottom of each post.
Physiotherapists like to treat the body-as-machine. They like quantitative research, clinical skills and definitional clarity, and they’ve held on to their biomedical principles through good times and bad. In some ways, this is understandable. Without an alternative curriculum to work from, how are people schooled in biological determinism going to know which direction to take their curriculum in? And why would they consider the alternatives to the traditional physiotherapy curriculum if they are so easily dismissed as fluffy, vague and unscientific.
One way to tackle this problem, and promote a more critical physiotherapy curriculum, would be for a group like the Critical Physiotherapy Network to put forward a set of principles that most everyone would be happy with It could be designed for undergraduate and graduate programmes. It would need to be specific enough to physiotherapy to address some of the priority issues (our approach to the body, rehabilitation ethics and professionalization, for example), but flexible enough to capture common issues in the humanities, philosophy and sociology. Plus, it should accommodate the necessary local and indigenous knowledge 0f each country that adopts it.
Who could be better placed than the Critical Physiotherapy Network to develop such a curriculum? Vote for this idea if you think we should make it part of our project work in 2015.
Post update: please note that voting closed on 7 October 2014 (results are available here), but please feel free to post your comments in the space below.
This is one of the single most important things I believe, as a group, we can offer our profession. To create robust, proactive, responsive and (of course) critical physiotherapists of the future we need to move beyond facts and consider the way we teach concepts and theories (from a wide range of academic perspectives and specialisms). Ensuring that our students can comfortably engage with ideas from philosophy, sociology and psychology, and integrate those ideas with more traditional physiotherapeutic pedagogy, has to be a key challenge. Yes, some of these approaches may be deemed fluffy and unscientific by some, but as a group we can influence these preconceptions by disseminating high quality (but accessible) papers, and robust, professionally meaningful empirical work. Vive la revolution!
Couldn’t agree more Fiona. I’ve spent a long time grappling with this problem. Our profession is so grounded in a biological view of health that we struggle to see ‘other’ ways to understand people’s different experiences of health and illness. We must at least try to find a way to break through this problem, or I fear that people will turn elsewhere to find more embodied experiences of physical rehabilitation.
A key target area. I completely agree with both you and Fiona here Dave. A network such as this is bound to have the appropriate weight to influence change at the right level across the board.
I am currently a very small cog in a project that may be relevant here as an example.
An evidence based lecture series has been created, critiqued and collaborated online to educate UK student doctors on the value of exercise as medicine. The slide sets have been scrutinise by a number of professionals worldwide who have each added and adjusted references, links, pictures, quotes etc.
The module is now being accredited and will be sold to UK medical schools.
We could do this.