The idea that people should take more personal responsibility for their health is nothing new. For more than 40 years now, we have been promoting the belief that self-care is obviously good and necessary, and that people should be less passive and less dependent. This view has been particularly prevalent in physiotherapy, where the shift away from so called 'passive' modalities has been accompanied by an equally powerful set of discourses pushing behaviour change and an activity-is-best agenda. We've written about some of the dangers of this approach elsewhere (Nicholls et al, 2018), but a recent paper published in the journal Sociology of Health and Illness adds weight to the belief … [Read more...]
“Seated physios giving advice on exercise to patients over the phone” – a follow-up
I posted a tweet about a small bit of news from the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) that had caught my eye yesterday. It was about 'A telephone assessment service in Cambridgeshire [that] is helping more than half of its physiotherapy patients to self-manage their conditions' (link to the full press release here). It featured an image that I thought was interesting and just a little ironic. Here is the image. My comment on Twitter was that this was 'a thing of postmodern beauty', and both the picture and the full report raised the ire of some in the Twitter community. There were a number of things going on in this report that I think said some important things about the … [Read more...]
New: Encroachment
One of the ways that physiotherapists have recently looked to secure greater influence in the health care system has been to take on role previously done by others. Extended scopes now include limited prescribing rights and some invasive procedures like injecting, cannulation and bronchoscopy. We now also have new consultancy, advisory and leadership roles that are changing the nature of our practice. And one of the most popular extensions that can be taken up by the whole profession has involved the drift towards public health medicine. Physiotherapists and others are looking at the possibility of offering 'wrap-around' care where once they were specialists in discrete areas of … [Read more...]
