Welcome to the website of ‘The Physio Communicator‘.
The Physio Communicator is a blog about communication and conversation with people with musculoskeletal pain and mobility problems. It is about communication skills for physiotherapists.
The goal of this blog is to create attention and awareness to our conversation with patients.
How important is our conversation? That you will read on the posts on this site.
Enjoy reading!
The Communicator
The communicator is one of the seven rolls from the so-called CanMEDS framework. This framework is used in many places in the world to describe the competencies of a specific (medical / paramedical) profession.
The Physio Communicator aims at professionalizing the conversations of physiotherapists with their patients.
It wants to support physiotherapists in developing communication skills, using effective strategies during history taking, improving patient education, collecting and summarizing scientific research, book reviews, tips & trics and much more.
CanMEDS
As mentioned above, the CanMEDS framework is used in many places in the world. It discribes 7 competencies that a healthcare professional should have.
The CanMEDS model is the starting point for describing the so-called medical competency frameworks and has been “conceived” by the royal college of physicians and surgeons of Canada.
The 7 competencies of the CanMEDS framework are:
- Physiotherapy Expert
- Communicator
- Collaborator
- Leader
- Health Advocate
- Scholar
- Professional
As you can see, the Communicator is one of the 7 competencies in the model.
And that is for a good reason. Both physicians and paramedics increasingly realize that communication with the patient is an essential part of their daily practice.
Good communication makes treatments more effective!
The Physio Communicator
Because the CanMEDS model is also increasingly used in the paramedical (and physiotherapy-) world, it seemed a good idea to use the role of Communicator for the name of this site.
And so The Physio Communicator was born!
In my book ‘Communication skills for physiotherapists‘, also translated in Spanish (Habilidades de comunicación para fisioterapeutas), I described the role of the Communicator extensively.
In all these years that I’m involved with the theme of communication, it surprised me that there wasn’t a comprehensive guide for how to communicate with patients dedicated to the field of physiotherapy.
In my book, I describe an easy to understand model that could function as a central point in learning and improving communication skills.
The model functions as a red thread for the book and a guide for (under)graduate PT’s.
Read more about my book, communication and my model at this site!