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Another busy year for the CPN Exec

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Last week we had our 11th CPN Exec meeting of the year, the second with our newest member Wenche Bjorbækmo who, with her colleagues Tobba Sudmann and Tone Dahl Michelsen, will bring a stronger connection to our many Scandinavian members.  The Exec now has nine members, in alphabetical order they are:

  • Wenche Bjorbækmo (Norway)
  • Barbara Gibson (Canada)
  • Viviana Silva Guerrero (Australia/Colombia)
  • Simon Kirkegaard (Australia/Denmark)
  • Dave Nicholls (New Zealand)
  • Gywn Owen (UK)
  • Michael Rowe (South Africa)
  • Jenny Setchell (Australia/Canada)
  • Nicky Wilson (UK)

For some months now we’ve been preparing for next year’s WCPT congress in Cape Town, in expectation that it will our biggest CPN gathering to date.  Lots of members will have submitted abstracts and we’ll be organising informal get-togethers like the celebration that recently took place at ER-WCPT in Liverpool.  We’ll be presenting our first Focused Symposium – one of only 17 running at the congress, and have been invited to host one of WCPT’s new free forums called Indaba sessions.  More on this soon.

Informal CPN gathering at ER-WCPT
Informal CPN gathering at ER-WCPT

We’re also going to run a special post-conference CPN event on 5th July 2017.  We’re organising a beautiful venue and have plans to have some book launches, some exciting announcements, guest speakers and conversations about the future of the Network.  We’ll email details out to members and post information on the blog closer to the time.

Earlier this month, Jenny Setchell and I delivered an invited plenary session at the 2nd Critical Perspectives in Nursing and Health conference in Sydney.  The talk titled ‘Working with complexities, contradictions and ambiguities’ was co-written with Barbara Gibson and explored the idea of multiplicity.  The presentation was based on a paper titled ‘Objecting: Multiplicity and the practice of physiotherapy’ that the three of had written and will appear in the journal Health next year.  At the same conference CPN members Anna Rajala and Seamus Barker delivered stand-out presentations on ‘Philosophy as resistance’ and ‘Narratives of psychosomatic pain’, and from our perspective, these were two of the most sophisticated, elegant presentations delivered over the three days of the conference.

Our Critical Studies in Physiotherapy book is now well under way, with 20 different authors working over the holidays to finish the 15 chapters that will make up the book.  The book is being published as an open source text in collaboration with the University of Oslo and Cappelen Damm in Norway, and hopefully will be available later next year.

‘Living as a disabled person can pose challenges, and many of these can be helped with medical care and treatment. However disabled people will tell you that the majority of challenges they face are not related to their bodies, but to material barriers such as lack of ramps, closed captioning or Braille texts, or to attitudes of others who assume they are “less than.” By actually listening to disabled people, we realize they are “disabled by” their worlds more than by their bodily differences’ (from Barbara Gibson’s piece in the Toronto Sun this week).
Speaking of publishing, Barbara Gibson had an article published in the Toronto Star newspaper this week.  The piece called for people, especially health professionals, to ‘Stop portraying childhood disability as tragic or inspirational'(link).

Meanwhile the Network goes from strength to strength, with more than 500 members in 30 countries.  We have any number of international collaborative projects under way, including many social media links through Twitter and Facebook (see, for example, Keith Waldron’s latest blogpost, Roger Kerry’s comments on recent posts on the biopsychosocial model, and Michael Rowe’s elegant educational blogposts).

2017 promises to be another big year for the Network.  We have no plans to rest on our laurels, and will continue to advocate for more critical thinking and practice in physiotherapy.  Thank you to everyone who has contributed to the Network this year – especially the people on our remarkable Executive.  You’re a wonderful and quite remarkable group of people.

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