New: Disruption

Disruption is a lovely geological word.  It suggests shaky ground and lava flows, destabilisation and disorganisation.

Most people working in health care today are fed up with disruption though.  Most would be perfectly happy if they never saw any more funding cuts, job freezes and reorganisations.  Unfortunately we know that disruption is an everyday occurrence in a health care system going through a long, slow, seismic unsettling.

But disruption need not be negative, and the Critical Physiotherapy Network is one small example of how a group of people are trying to change the rhetoric surrounding disruption and change.

The key to this new approach lies with the ideas of openings and closings.

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze had a simple and elegant way of deciding whether an idea was worth pursuing.  If the idea opened a door to new possibilities, then it was good; if it closed a door, it was bad.

There are many things in health care that close doors: rules, regulations, routines, conventions, prescriptions, dogmas, guidelines, standardised pathways, etc., all devised by people who would like you to do it their way.

There are fewer people prepared to disrupt the present with the intention of leaving the door open for you to decide what you want to do with this newfound opportunity.  All too often we replace one bad hegemony with another.

The CPN is a place which works hard to open doors to new possibilities in the future, and it is our belief that this kind of disruption is a lot more palatable than the kinds of bitter disruption that have beset our work over the last few year.