Abstract
Challenged health systems are a motivation for health education reform. Although resources-limited areas cover our planet, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest disease burden, yet the lowest health-care provider and medical school density of any region in the world. Malawi is among the most under-resourced countries in the world. While much of the data focus on dental, medical, and psychiatric service provision, physical therapists are also in short supply. Among the barriers to achieving the recommended standards for physical therapist education, African physiotherapists (the term for “physical therapists” in Africa) identify limited training opportunities, limited research education, and limited resources and funding. The purpose of this article is to describe an international partnership for strengthening the Malawian physiotherapist workforce capacity through curriculum revision in the Department of Physiotherapy at the University of Malawi’s College of Medicine.
Highlights
Malawi is a small country in southeast Africa with a population of 17,215,000 [1] and an acute shortage of rehabilitation workers: a ratio of 0.8 physiotherapists per 100,000 people [2]
Development of a plan for the new curriculum proposal to be reviewed by the University of Malawi Senate for implementation in August 2017
Course content, and course outlines have been developed and revised and the goal, ambitious, was to implement the new 4-year curriculum for the academic year. This timeline has been pushed back 1 year to allow other departments under curriculum review within the College of Medicine (COM) to be reviewed at the same time as the Department of Physiotherapy by the COM Faculty Senate
Summary
Malawi is a small country in southeast Africa with a population of 17,215,000 [1] and an acute shortage of rehabilitation workers: a ratio of 0.8 physiotherapists per 100,000 people (by comparison the United States has nearly 1,350 per 100,000 people) [2]. Malawi has 147 qualified physiotherapists and 27 physiotherapist interns registered with the Medical Council of Malawi [3]. This number overstates the Malawian workforce because it includes physiotherapists who are volunteers during the year and are not residing in Malawi. According to the WCPT, physiotherapy is a vital portion of the health-care delivery system concerned with maximizing musculoskeletal function, within the areas of disability prevention, health promotion, rehabilitation, and treatment. Physiotherapists provide services to clients to develop, preserve, and return functional capacity and maximal movement throughout the lifecycle. It is at the core of impairment and disability prevention [5]
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