Are you interested in the history of physical therapy?

At WCPT in Cape Town there was an incredible turn-out for a 7am Monday morning meeting of people interested in the history of physical therapy.  The upshot of the meeting was that we agreed that we needed to form an international physical therapy history group.

And so, we’ve started asking who would be interested in coming along for the ride.

So far we’ve got 37 ‘members’ across more than a dozen countries covering all five continents.

The intention is to form a network – not dissimilar to the CPN – but perhaps functioning a little differently.

The focus will probably be on raising the profile of history in and around the profession; establishing an interactive archive of resources and materials to further the study of the history of physical therapy; finding ways to make these resources available to clinicians, researchers, educators and students; and developing learning and teaching resources to inform physical therapy curricula internationally.

The history of physical therapy has really started to attract people’s interest in recent years, perhaps because we’re asking a lot more questions about where the profession is going, so if this is something that interests you, or you know someone who you think might be interested, send me an email (david.nicholls@aut.ac.nz), and I’ll add you to our growing contact list.

At this stage we’re just trying to build our network.  We’ll start working on the organising committee, objectives, activities and shared interests in the next few months.

A/Prof Dave Nicholls, AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand