Sarah Oosman - 30DoS - Day 2

My name is Sarah Oosman. I am a 1st generation settler Canadian with mixed ethnicity (South Asian/Mauritius & Wales) and currently live, play, and work on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis People, also known as Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. I have been a physical therapist for more than 20 years and am an associate professor in the School of Rehabilitation Science, University of Saskatchewan. I am also a researcher with the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit (SPHERU) and a co-lead on an Indigenous-led Network Environment for Indigenous Health Research (NEIHR) in Saskatchewan. I joined the CPN at its inception in 2014.

I spend my time in the interstitia, the middle ground, and the space that connects several worlds in both practice, theory, and philosophy. I am committed to Indigenous community-driven action research that leads to the development and implementation of culture-based, meaningful health promoting interventions across the lifespan. I work collaboratively and closely with Métis and First Nation peoples and communities, as well as interdisciplinary and interprofessional teams. I am very passionate about addressing health inequities through respectful relationships, partnerships, and safe, courageous conversations.

I am drawn to critical physiotherapy as it is a way of thinking and practicing that engages with ideas on the boundaries and the fringes of what we know our profession to be. Critical physiotherapy allows us to imagine the potential that we have not quite yet tapped into, supporting our profession’s evolution necessary to meet the ever-changing health needs of individuals and society. We live in a world where there is so much health inequity… negatively impacting individuals and populations who do not necessarily feel connected within the ‘mainstream’ white-dominant culture. Physiotherapists can use their voice in changing this and redressing the power differentials that maintain and perpetuate health inequity. I also believe that collective thinking and problem-solving, as a group of critical physiotherapy practitioners, can influence change more broadly and more efficiently.

Moving forward, I am curious about what the Critical Physiotherapy Network can do to influence the role physiotherapy can play in redressing power hierarchies that exist across diverse health care settings throughout the world. I would like to see our profession be a leader in advocating for new and innovative ways to narrow health inequities that exist across diverse global populations, to learn from world-views and paradigms that stretch those of the mainstream Western world, and re-imagine what physiotherapy has to offer.