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Letters and Responses |
Having been an academic in physical therapy programs in 2 major research-intensive universities in the United States from 1981 to 1989, I moved to Canada and the University of British Columbia's (UBC) physical therapy program in 1990 and have remained there ever since. Not only are there far fewer physical therapist education programs in Canada (n=13) than in the United States, they also are much more standardized in their approach. All 13 are located in research-intensive universities and are part of major health sciences centers.
Consequently, the pressure at most of these universities to conduct and publish research is very strong. For example, at UBC, our program is housed within the Faculty of Medicine, and we are expected to attain the same benchmarks as all other faculty within Medicine (ie, 2–3 peer-reviewed publications per year per faculty member).
Because, as a Canadian physical therapy program, we were not included in the study by Richter et al, I decided to do a comparison of our own physical therapy faculty's productivity during the same time period: 1998–2002. However, instead of doing a PubMed/CINAHL search, it was easier (and likely to be more accurate, as pointed out by Bennett and Ohtake5) to just ask my colleagues who were on faculty at that time to send me their CVs.
From 1998 to 2002, we were a professional (entry-level) bachelor's degree program. Although we also offered a research master's degree (MSc), our PhD program did not begin until 2003. From 1998 through 2002, we had 8 full-time faculty members; however, 2 of the 8 were on teaching tracks versus academic tracks and, therefore, were not expected to produce research articles as part of their faculty mandate. During that 5-year period, we published 51 peer-reviewed articles, which would rank us as third (among the US programs) in Table 2 of the article by Richter et al.2 Dividing that number by 8 (and including the 2 teaching-track faculty members), our ratio of publications per faculty member was 6.4—which would place us second among US physical therapy programs (or perhaps first, based on Bennett and Ohtake's very candid letter stating that the University at Buffalo program actually published 4.3 articles per faculty member5).
Although my academic colleagues in the United States might accuse me of "tooting our own horn," I am sharing this information with the hopes that it might be useful to the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education (CAPTE) in their future accreditation efforts to realize that a relatively small faculty (n=8) from a professional bachelor's degree physical therapy program (at that time) can produce a very strong level of "scholarship," even without a DPT program! And many other Canadian physical therapy programs likely meet or exceed our research productivity.
My sincere thanks to Richter and colleagues for providing this critical baseline on faculty productivity across physical therapist education programs in the United States. For the sake of our scholarly reputation as a profession, I hope that this article will provide a wake-up call to all of my academic colleagues "south of the border." How can we possibly expect our physical therapist clinician colleagues to be evidencebased practitioners if we are not providing them with the evidence on which to base that practice?
SR Harris, PT, PhD, FAPTA, is Professor, Department of Physical Therapy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
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