Our mission is to inspire our learners to excel as competent and compassionate physiotherapists.
Queen's Health Sciences has been a global leader in Health Sciences education and research for over 150 years. At Queen's, the mission of our physiotherapy program is to inspire our learners to excel as competent and compassionate physiotherapists through transformative education research, student experiences, and collaborative partnerships.
To achieve these aspirations, our goal is to develop and implement an innovative curriculum based on best evidence in teaching and learning, and to graduate competent and compassionate physiotherapists ready for 21st century practice.
We have redesigned our physiotherapy curriculum into a model of learning known as Competency-Based Education. This is a new physiotherapy curriculum at Queen's, and as the incoming class of 2023 and graduates of 2025, you are the first cohort to participate in our Competency-Based curriculum. Competency-Based Education allows for maximum benefit as you train to build your profile of essential competencies required for physiotherapy licensure.
Competency-Based Education organizes training around milestones and essential competencies, rather than content areas or knowledge. A milestone is the ability that is expected of a physiotherapist at a specific level of their training. Many milestones are related to a specific essential competency. Milestones are progressive, and they build your capacity from when you enter the program at the foundation's level, and then you progress towards the transition of practice at the end of the two years. Our newly designed competency-based curriculum has been built in milestones to support you as you develop your competencies over time through the course outcomes.
Let's take a look at the attributes of a Queen's physiotherapy graduate being a compassionate physiotherapist through developing the essential competency of professionalism, humanism, and cultural humility. You will embrace social responsibility as a competency. A milestone that builds to this, is to identify social determinants of health and how they influence health and functioning. Another competency you will build is acting with professional integrity. A milestone that will lead to this, is to behave with honesty, humility, openness, and respect for others. You will also build a competency providing culturally safe care and practice with cultural humility. And a milestone that builds to this, is to demonstrate awareness, the potential for bias and cultural differences that may affect clinical care. As you can see from this example you will gain the requisite knowledge from teaching and learning activities, so you can achieve the milestones, and in turn these milestones will build towards the competency.
Through the progressive achievement of milestones and competencies, you will graduate the Queen's physiotherapy program as a ready to practice physiotherapist that embodies professionalism, humanism, and cultural humility.