ABSTRACT
This chapter explores four locations where the tensions currently surrounding physiotherapy are operating: in education, practice, regulation and research. It focuses the challenges facing lecturers and students as they try to prepare for the uncertainty and instability of future practice. The chapter looks at the ways that practitioners are having to change as a result of external pressures that they are ill equipped to deal with and argue – perhaps counterintuitively – for the benefits of regulation and against professional autonomy. It also looks at the remarkable expansion in clinical research, perhaps the biggest growth area in physiotherapy over the last two decades, and explores how this is shaping physiotherapy's future. The chapter describes the place where physiotherapy practice begins – in the colleges and universities where proto-therapists are moulded to meet the demands of future practice.
