Background
We are a group of physiotherapy educators, practitioners, and researchers dedicated to integrating health justice into physiotherapy practice, education, and scholarship. This includes the upcoming update to the Competency Profile for Physiotherapists in Canada; a document that outlines the expectations of all Canadian physiotherapists.

We invite you to join us and share your insights as part of this new collective. We are hoping to come together to create:
1.  A set of health justice principles for physiotherapy practice, education, and scholarship, and
2. Concrete examples for how these principles could be incorporated into the upcoming competency profile update

Roles and Responsibilities
We have created an initial draft of a participatory structure that includes three committees. This is a virtual opportunity. We want to emphasize that this is a preliminary stage of this initiative, and we fully expect the structure and processes to evolve with your input. We invite physiotherapist researchers and patient partners from across Canada to join whichever committee they are most interested in. We are hoping for a variety of perspectives, backgrounds and lived experiences of interacting with the healthcare system. Experience with physiotherapy would be helpful but not necessary.

These three committees are:
1.  Working committee: Developing plans for the initiative, in charge of data collection, data analysis, presenting data to other committees (oversight and advisory committee).

2. Advisory committee: Gives feedback on work of working committee. Advises oversight committee.

3.Oversight committee: Provides ultimate oversight over initiative, approves project plans and outputs.

Time Commitment
Will start in April 2025 and likely run for two years. Time commitment is approximately 2 hours per month (one 1-hour meeting and 1-hour of prep per month).

Compensation
We do not currently have funding for this project but we are working on getting funding so that we can compensate patient partners for their time. Patient partners will be given credit on any material that is published out of this initiative (e.g. journal articles, reports, etc.).

For more information or to apply please connect with
Ellen McGarity-Shipley
Email: ellen.ms@dal.ca
For more information about Ellen’s research work please see short video  here