Thanks Fyzzio

Some good points you are making.

Professional autonomy does come at a cost - rights come with responsibilities. In gaining autonomy we need to be very prepared so that we do no harm to patients who are vulnerable or need care beyond our scope of practice. It only takes one sensational case of malpractice to taint the profession in the eyes of society and can send the profession back decades. I recall in Australia we were lucky not to have a serious adverse effect from a neck manipulation while other professions got tainted with unsafe practice over a couple of adverse events.

Entry level courses, regardless of whether they are Bachelors, Masters or Doctorate must have the appropriate content. such as pathology of a wide variety of medical conditions (beyond the types of conditions we treat) so we can understand what we are seeing, pharmacology so we know when we are seeing side effects or adverse effects and know we are safe to treat the patient a certain way, and skill in triage for non physiotherapy - problems so we quickly refer on when there is a problem - these are all basic skills for primary care practice.

Standards do vary all around the world and what is considered a physio's scope also may vary somewhat. However hopefully the WHOLE world wide profession is moving in the same direction towards autonomy. This is important for the international standing of the profession. It doesn't matter if it takes some countries a little longer to reach autonomy as long as we are all moving that way.

It wasn't that long ago that NZ didn't offer baccalaureate education. even in the early 90's We just had a 3 year diploma from a technical institute and we were then definitely under the wing the medical profession then. So it is possible for things to change quite quickly.

Entry into the universities and having a research capability seem particularly important steps for raising the professions standing