Professor M W Krause
Political emancipation in South Africa has gone beyond social reform. Change in higher education is prevalent. To ensure accreditable, evidence-based education in health sciences revised curricula have become essential. Against this backdrop this study was implemented.
The main aim of the study was to explore community needs and international trends in physiotherapy. A non-experimental research design with the Delphi technique to collect the data was used.
The literature survey addressed the following:
Objectives for physiotherapy education and training were drawn up and then converted into learning outcomes. The outcomes were structured in the form of a checklist with a Likert-scale rating of 1-5. The checklist constituted the measuring instrument which was tested by the Delphi technique. The final framework is based on this information.
The framework attends to the transfer of programmes form colleges and hospitals, where they were predominatly "vocational" or clinically focused, to universities, where they have assumed applied and clinical sciences. As products of a university education physiotherapy graduates are expected to possess not only discipline-specific skills but also skills that can be applied to rural communities. The framework is also suitable for national and international use.