Ralph Hammond - 30DoS - Day 3

My interest in critical physiotherapy was stimulated by work on clinical effectiveness I did in the 1990s, when I discovered how few widely used outcome measures were available in the languages many people in the UK speak; it made me realise how narrowly anglocentric physiotherapy in the UK is. I have been trying to question and understand my own privileged, normative, history ever since.

I’m a father; a white, middle-class, heterosexual, English, man. I’m a physiotherapist by profession. I work clinically as a stroke coordinator; I conduct reviews of how people are reconstructing their lives, at 6 months post-stroke, physically, mentally, emotionally.

I’m interested in how physiotherapists navigate the lifeworld of health/care, and how we enact the values we claim to hold. So, I’m interested in identity, sense making and storytelling, in socialisation and individuation. I’m interested in what are those values, attitudes, assumptions we hold and are socialised into, what are our motivations, and our beliefs.

Our current times are challenging what we, at all levels of societies, mean by, for example, truth, rationality, democracy. How can history, politics, theology, post-colonialism, the humanities, inform what and how physiotherapists think, speak, and behave, and what we aspire to achieve?

I hope the CPN can continue to provide a space for people to reflect and share the wider world of ideas and perspectives, learning and experiences; to articulate what it might mean for individuals, their work, and the profession more widely; to challenge, to nurture, to be curious.