Purpose
The primary objective for sharing our activity via a Special Interest Report is to illustrate the need for independent measurable compliance of all physiotherapy services against HCPC and CSP Regulations and Standards.
Currently the HCPC re registration focus is on continuous professional development and the Care Quality Commission does not have jurisdiction to regulate standalone physiotherapy services: Therefore, all other regulatory checking is undertaken and reliant on the individual alone. The secondary objective of is to encourage physiotherapists to consider in depth and ensure they appreciate what are they stating, what they agree they are doing when they reregister and sign to state that they comply with all standards and regulations? Could auditing prove that this was the case and, if not, then why are they signing?
Approach
We used auditing public and private physiotherapy services as our method and gained wide experience of differing compliance. This caused us concern and highlighted the lack of consistency across the sector. Ultimately the patient was choosing a registered physiotherapist by looking at the HCPC website and assuming by this that the physiotherapist must be regulated and audited.
The methodological approach taken was to survey physiotherapists and ask them how confident they thought they were in complying with all the quality assurance standards of the CSP? They all stated that yes they were.
Outcomes
Our results showed that compliance ranged from 20% to 85%. None of the pilot sites were 100% compliant.
Implications
The conclusion from this study is that there is a requirement for an independent audit of processes in every physiotherapy practice to ensure that the patient and physiotherapists are working with and meet all the requirements of the standards and regulations.
Our suggestions for future work are that a framework is developed to enable measurement of adherence and compliance to these standards and regulations. The framework is independently randomly audited with an agreed sample size every year.
The project implies that there is a requirement for further investigation and support across the profession to ensure that the evidence needed to meet the standards and regulations is more widely understood.
Top three learning points
1. Physios sign every two years to re register with HCPC and do not fully understand what they are signing
2. Regulation in the physiotherapy sector is long overdue
3. Physios need more support with governance of processes
Funding acknowledgements
This work was self-funded.
Additional notes
This work was presented at Physiotherapy UK 2018
For further information about this work, please contact: sandra@physioadvisors.com