Executive summary of our IPPTA meeting in Cape Town September 2024
We were very fortunate to start our two days of meetings with a presentation from the President of World Physiotherapy, Michel D. Landry PT. MBA, PhD, who joined us for the majority of our first day and got to chat to many of our MORs present. It was an honour to welcome Michel to our meeting and he spoke of many aspects of global physiotherapy to include the challenges of physiotherapy businesses and the growing influence of AI. This became a recurrent theme through our two days
We spent the rest of the day in lively discussion groups sharing successes and challenges across the world on a range of topics brought to our Executive by our MORs. Many MORs had prepared information and presentations to start each discussion topic, and we were fortunate to have inout throughout the day from Celia Champion from Painless Practice who facilitated discussions and generated ideas and questions. Thank you Celia.
Our first day concentrated on the challenges faced by our self employed and business owner members. We covered the thorny topics of
- Identifying effective strategies for advocacy. What has worked and what hasn’t. it was heartening to hear there were many impressive success stories
- Obtaining appropriate payment produced interesting debate and some new ideas for people to return to their Boards to describe
- Navigating the administrative barriers to payment. Here the differences were marked across our different health care systems, and many ended the session feeling luckier than they thought they were!
Day two started with a catch up from our Executive. We heard reports from each area of work and reminded ourselves of our strategic Plan and its importance in driving the direction of IPPA we also welcomed our new Treasurer Stefan. Then back to our group sessions all fired up for another day.
This second day was targeting our member organisations and our shard challenges namely;
- Finding. keeping and developing volunteers to secure succession planning and innovation
- Attracting and keeping members in a changing climate of technology and social media support groups
- Recruiting and developing staff
We also shared two wonderful social events hosted by IPPTA and of course our South African colleagues. If you didn’t attend, you certainly missed a treat of African dancing and wonderful food and atmosphere. There is no doubt that the face-to-face value of meeting in person and chatting at every opportunity is something difficult to quantify but we all made lifelong friends and learnt ideas and ways of working that quite simply could not be shared in the same way over any electronic platform. Details of next years meeting will be shared soon so make your plans now. Something not to be missed.
Here are the most frequently used words to describe the event:
