ER-WCPT:
Canadian Physiotherapy Association chief says the profession must demonstrate
its value to decision makers:
Physiotherapists need to understand and leverage the
politics of decision making, according to Michael Brennan, chief executive
officer at the Canadian Physiotherapy Association.
‘We may be factually correct in what we know, but we are
bringing incomplete information to the task at hand,’ said Mr Brennan, an
economist by background, in his CSP Founders’ Lecture at the 4th congress of
the European regions of the World Confederation for Physical Therapy in
Liverpool today.
‘Put another way, all evidence is information, but not
all information is evidence.’
He said the profession was unlikely to have high level
evidence to apply to every healthcare decision. And there will almost always be
incomplete data and unique contextual consideration.
Structure evidence:
But as the gaps in evidence are going to be filled by
assumption, physiotherapists should find a way to structure evidence so that
assumptions and circumstance are accounted for.
He told delegates about a project in 2013 when his
association used an MDCA (multi-criteria decision analysis) framework. It was a
tool which has been used for more than a decade in different economic settings
and had achieved ‘considerable traction’ in healthcare.
‘At the end of this project we had a very well-informed
assessment of the value of physiotherapy in 12 practice settings,’ said Mr
Brennan.
‘We produced short information sheets for each, with
pithy statements as to the positive impact of physiotherapy on patient care,
population health and resource management.
Value of physio:
‘These documents, and our much better appreciation of
the decision making process, have allowed us to greatly improve our advocacy
efforts at the grass roots and ministerial level.’
But in his speech on the theme of the value of
physiotherapy, Mr Brennan said that every day practitioners, administrators and
politicians are choosing how best to allocate scarce healthcare resources.
‘The closer these decisions are to the patient, the more
likely we in this room are to understand them, and hopefully affect them in a
way that is favourable to good outcomes,’ he told delegates.
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