Are doctors happy to refer cases to physiotherapist?

[SuperFizz]

Hi I'm a new student in Physiotherapy and I would like to ask the following question - Is Physiotherapy an essential profession in the healthcare, if so, why are medical practitioners reluctant to refer the patients to the physiotherapists? Does this happen only in some countries?

Hi there August1302, Wow I see you are from Mali? Welcome and well done one producing great music from your country. I have a lot of it

Anyway in some countries Physio's are primary care practitioners. This means that anyone can come off the street and be treated. This is unfortunately influenced by insurers who make many of their clients go to their GP first. This means that even in a primary care setting the general practitioner is still controlling a significant amount of the patient throughput, of course without any evidence to suggest why. In this case probably as it reduces the use of physio as an auxiliary service and makes the insurers more money.

In other countries, like the USA, patients must come via referral in most cases, sometimes with complete prescriptive courses of treatment. The issue there is that GP's a buying big clinics and employing physio's that they refer to constantly to make cash off them! This is currently under review and debate in the USA.

Whatever the case it is important to understand that a GP who understands what we do and therefore appreciates what we do as a problem solver for them will often be supportive and will refer clients. Two interesting approaches to influencing this is 1. To treat the GP to a few sessions for their problems and 2. Ask all you local GP's to send you their number 1 pain in the rear end patient. Then do you best to sort them out. If you can take that annoyance away from the GP they will refer to you for life

Reluctance comes from a lack of firsthand knowledge or budgetary constraints that might be short or being spent elsewhere. This too is a problem in fund holding GP practices that actually pay from their governmental allowances for all ancillary services. This has been a consideration in the UK. So in summary this is a large topic. One that would be a great undergraduate essay topic.

Best of luck in your studies.