Louise Søgaard Hansen – 30 DoS – Day 25

Over the past three years, I’ve been working on my PhD-thesis and thus striving to develop research skills, particularly in the field of critical health research. The thesis deals with patient-centeredness in physiotherapy practice, which is a topic I’ve been engaged in for some time, theoretically as well as in practice. I’ve been a physiotherapist for almost 30 years and have experienced the profession from many perspectives, both as a clinician where I trained as a musculoskeletal therapist and later as a lecturer at the physiotherapy programme.

In terms of thinking critically, it was my transdisciplinary master’s in ‘Health Promotion and Educational Science’ which opened my mind to a whole new way of thinking and reflecting. The combination of critical health research, sociology and critical pedagogy forced me to start questioning the ‘taken-for-granted’ norms about bodies, health, illness, impairment, physical activity, well-being, inequality in health, etc. which works in the physiotherapy profession.

In my current research, I am interested in people’s encounters with the health care system, and how patient- or person-centeredness is practiced here. I critically ask questions about what patient- or person-centeredness becomes, as it is often understood as implicitly embedded in clinical practice. I’m curious as to how clinical guidelines, biomedical informed knowledge and professional logics impacts the way physiotherapists address the patient. I’m interested to understand how and if the patient’s own experiences and knowledge about handling life with disease is truly included in the clinical encounter. Thinking critically, for me, implies asking questions and challenging the way notions like ‘patient- or person-centeredness’ is understood and practiced. How it is considered as being naturally embedded in everyday practices and simply not considered something to reflect upon. And if it is, then becomes a question of the relation between the physiotherapist and the patient. To think critically implies asking if this is really the case? Is the physiotherapist an island? I understand physiotherapy as produced through a complex network of institutionalised logics, clinical guidelines, procedures, and the prevailing understandings of what ‘good’ physiotherapy is. Understandings that I find important to explore and challenge.

To me, it is crucial that we, as a profession, start asking these questions. Not only to understand the ‘softer’ elements in physiotherapy, but also in order to challenge the hegemonic understandings of ‘normal’ movement or body performance. In my conversations with patients, it has become clear to me, that if the profession doesn’t move beyond understanding people’s health-related problems as a question of ‘fixing’ it, then our patients will find help somewhere else. And I think that the CPN is a brilliant way of connecting physiotherapists who are willing to step aside and take a look at the physiotherapy profession and the practices within from another perspective. I hope to be able to contribute to this by participating in the ongoing conversations in the network and by insisting on doing research that fundamentally challenges the inherent norms in physiotherapy practice.