Up and coming with the CPN

Work in an organisation like the CPN can feel like breathing. Sometimes you’re inhaling ideas, opportunities, and challenges, and other times you’re putting things out into the atmosphere, wondering if your breath smells.

Since 2014 we’ve been trying to be a positive force for an otherwise physiotherapy: writing blog posts, journal articles, and books; running online courses and month-long posting campaigns; making friends, and building networks.

But our work has definitely slowed this year. We’re writing less editorial blog posts and we ran no Critical Physiotherapy Course in 2021.

Perhaps it is COVID, the climate emergency, the existential trauma of Trump, Brexit, and Afghanistan, or maybe it’s just the seven-year itch? Whatever the cause, the CPN has remained a very vibrant organisation, and these last few months have felt much more like a short period of exhalation than expiration.

Speaking personally, one of the biggest challenges of the last year has been finishing the follow-up book to The End of Physiotherapy.

Physiotherapy Otherwise has been four years in the writing, and 20 years in the planning. It’s now with the publishers and going through the review process, but should be out in print by the end of the year. It is by a significant margin the most exciting thing I’ve ever written, and it introduces ideas and concepts that I hope will be a real game-changer for physiotherapy in the future. More on this soon.

Then, this year’s 30 Days of September campaign starts in a week’s time, and this year we’re going back to our roots and the first campaign we ran, where we highlighted 30 of our members. Each day through September you’ll see a short profile of someone in the CPN. Everyone was asked five questions:

1. Tell us a little about your current work and study, especially how you think and practice critically
2. What is it about critical physiotherapy that appeals to you?
3. What do you bring to the CPN?
4. How would you like to see critical physiotherapy community develop over the next few years?
5. How would you like to see the broader physiotherapy profession develop?

And you’ll get a real insight into the amazing lives and work of some of our members throughout the month.

And just to prove we have been busy while we’ve been a little bit quieter, the CPN Exec has been discussing our next big project for a few months now and we could be about to launch our biggest project to date. Members should be hearing about this in the next few days.

So despite everything going on around us, the work of the CPN goes on. The time for quiet, mindful breathing may now be coming to an end and a new period of manual hyperventilation beginning.

Viva la revolución!