Physiotherapists don't generally think our profession is 'political.' We mostly work on people's bodies, in one-to-one sessions, and few of us use our social standing as respected, orthodox health professionals to campaign for community causes. There are no physiotherapy-specific models of population health, and subjects like primary health care and health promotion are only just beginning to appear in undergraduate curricula. So while physiotherapists are experts in the assessing and treating the body-as-machine, and we are increasingly interested in people lived experiences of health and illness, we are less aware of the social determinants of health. Social determinants are those … [Read more...] about Social determinants of health – are we doing enough?
Really Good Stuff: Lessons learned through innovation in medical education
Each year, the journal Medical Education produces a list of brief papers called 'Really Good Stuff: Lessons learned through innovation in medical education.' It usually contains some interesting ideas. Here is the latest edition. A peer-reviewed collection of short reports from around the world on innovative approaches to medical education (pages 1101–1102) Article first published online: 12 OCT 2014 | DOI: 10.1111/medu.12600 Introduction (page 1103) M Brownell Anderson Article first published online: 12 OCT 2014 | DOI: 10.1111/medu.12599 Multiple mini-interviews combined with group interviews in medical student selection (page 1104) Shih-Chieh Liao, Tzuen-Ren Hsiue, … [Read more...] about Really Good Stuff: Lessons learned through innovation in medical education
Is behaviourism the future for physiotherapy?
Yesterday, I took part in one of the regular and always enjoyable Physiotalk Tweet Chats (#physiotalk). This one was on the role of physiotherapy in exercise prescription. As usual, the discussion ranged widely over all sorts of topics: whether physiotherapists were experts in exercise prescription and what needs to be taught in the UG curriculum not being the least of them. One thing that came through strongly was a desire to manage the client/patient's behaviour. Words like adherence, compliance and motivation kept coming up and people seemed to recognise that all the skill in the world wouldn't matter to the therapist if the patient didn't engage. As someone who's read their fair … [Read more...] about Is behaviourism the future for physiotherapy?