Hi All, I dont believe that BUPA will re-roll the dice.
The 5 years limit has been in place for some time amongst various forms of therapy including Hypnotherapy, and I think Osteopathy and Acupuncture. It is their policy. Axa are unlikely to open membership to people for a while, because they have sufficient on their register. With regard to a comment made earlier about coming straight out of college and starting in private practice. A Physiotherapist only completes about 250 tops clinical hours in outpatients. So in comparison to the sports therapist, it may well be that the ST actually does more clinical hours in what they are trained in. Its a very narrow field. Chiropractors and Osteopaths do between 1200 and 2000 really quite specific clinical practice hours in training, with the Chiro doing a year assigned to a private pract at the end of the course, so I understand, Osteopaths on graduation customarily join a private practice as a junior, with mentored suport, and responsibility for building their private lists. I have tried rescruiting on this basis recently and had very poor success.

A lot of this is historic. The training NHS Physiotherapists get is an NHS costed course, so the training fees are based on people going into the the NHS. Plus the clinical content is based on people carrying on gaining experience, with up to 2 years of rotations, or about 2000 clinical hours for competency. As I see it a shake up in training is needed. A costed training course specific to outpatient / sports work with built in business studies etc could be designed.... well except that folk could have done Osteopathy and Chiropractic. Isn't the point here that a lot of new grads are very angry and feel tricked into believing they will immediately have jobs unlike other university graduates?

Coming back to the BUPA point, if you are qualifed, you are most certainly qualified...in other words jumped the jumps, to call yourself a Physiotherapist, be HPC registered. BUT clinical hours are what counts. I believe that BUPA etc might benefit from considering setting a number on recorded clinical hours, and role specificity.

The biggest, and most worrying issue here, is actually the lack of inpatient orthopaedics, neuro rehab, early stage care in the NHS. so that new raduates can gain all that HUGE clinical experience, like driving a car on lots of different road conditions, after just passing the test. I'm sorry to say, there are plenty of very academic folk out there, with little hands on capability.
A solution some new grads may consider, is NHS junior job sharing. If every new post was split in half, or even a third, then double or triple the number of new grads would get NHS experience, and weekend work etc would be covered more easily.
Why says NHS jobs have to be full time? Why cant new grad set their sites on say 15 hours NHS and working elsewhere in an established private practice on a fee sharing basis part time, or even part time in Waitrose?