Globally, physiotherapists are at different phases of professional development requiring different types of leadership:

Phase 1: Professional development and recognition phase. Physiotherapists are establishing their profession and working towards professional autonomy, independence and possible demarcation from other health professionals. This phase also encompasses physiotherapists who are establishing new areas of practice or building evidence to support expanded practice. In this phase, leadership requires a capacity to develop and bring together the evidence base underpinning practice, and advocate for the profession within a health system.

Challenges: In this phase, physiotherapists may encounter resistance from health practitioners who perceive the change as professional competition or conflict from those who disagree with the area of physiotherapy development.

Strategies: Leaders need ways of identifying and responding to different stages of readiness and strategies to acknowledge conflict, and being able to specify and justify the evidence base for and the value of ‘new physiotherapy skills’ or ‘expanded recognition or practices”. It may also require capacities to bring together relevant research to compare/contrast physiotherapy skills and contributions compared to other health professions.

Phase 2: Building patient centred practice phase encompasses situations where questions arise about how physiotherapy can best meet the needs of the patients they currently and might potentially serve. Leadership in this phase requires a capacity to reach different patient groups and to develop and justify models of care designed to meet diverse populations.

Challenges include changing expectations and needs of patients or health consumers and the increase in professionals offering services which overlap with physiotherapy.

Strategies: Leaders will need skills to gather data about patients’ or population’s needs. They will need to be able to communicate confidence and certainty about the value of physiotherapy including presenting evidence and demonstrating how physiotherapists can expand and respond to changing needs. Physiotherapy leaders may also need to advocate for and demarcate the unique skills that therapists can offer.

Phase 3: Professional advocacy phase refers to situations where physiotherapists are needing to build a case or synthesise data about why and how health funding should prioritise the work of physiotherapists or utilise their services more efficiently and how physiotherapy might contribute to the delivery of health care.

Challenges: include the problem of diminishing or finite resources in health service delivery and models of care which may not be fit for purpose.

Strategies: include knowing when and how to speak up as advocates for patients or for the physiotherapy profession. An understanding of building collaborations and being able to effectively position physiotherapy within health systems.

Physiotherapy clinicians working directly with patients, leading departments, managing health centres and teams or educating students may all find themselves requiring leadership skills any of these 3 phases of practice.

Learning objectives: Participants will
1. Identify leadership theories which are relevant to physiotherapy practice;
2. Recognise challenges to effective leadership across different physiotherapy practice situations;
3. Practice leadership skills relevant to challenges arising from organisational, professional behaviour and professional development situations.

In relation to each phase of physiotherapy practice, the symposium will draw on participants’ own experiences of leadership and combine that expertise with established key concepts from leadership theory to apply them to different phases. Participants will have opportunities to discuss cases from education, practice and policy and find practical responses to day-to-day challenges that physiotherapy leaders encounter.