Registrar’s Blog: Reflections from My Inaugural Year

By: Craig Roxborough, Registrar and CEO

Just over a year ago I sat down to start my role as Registrar and CEO here at the College of Physiotherapists of Ontario. Shortly thereafter I was introduced through a getting to know me Q&A where I shared a bit about myself and how I landed in this role. Since then, I have followed up with a few blog posts reflecting on our progress during my first months, collecting and protecting demographic data, and the implications of artificial intelligence on professional practice.

Later this fall you’ll see the College’s Annual Report with a letter from me more formally laying out some of our important deliverables from the 2023/2024 fiscal year. In the meantime, I wanted to use this blog post to share a few other personal reflections about what we’ve been up to and what’s on the docket for the rest of this year and beyond.

Engagement

The highlight of my year has been building relationships with our system partners and engaging with many of you at various conferences and meetings. I’ve also enjoyed reading your comments on my blog posts and the emails you’ve sent to my registrar@collegept.org email address.

Taking time to hear from the profession is a key part of our responsibility as a regulator and I’ve benefited greatly from understanding your experience with the healthcare system and with the College.

This year we had a chance to receive feedback from many of you through our registrant survey. It was a great opportunity to determine how you prefer to engage with the College and your perspective on the materials we produce to support you. We heard that the modules and webinars we’ve been offering have been well received, what else we can do to build further awareness about our standards consultation processes, and how your voice will impact change. But it was also reassuring to hear that many of you feel as though the College’s approach to regulation is balanced and that you’ve seen positive changes – we are available to support but also leave room for physiotherapists to thrive professionally.

This is all complemented by the 20+ engagement and outreach activities we undertook over the year to provide helpful information and to connect with you.

Accountability for Performance

Who doesn’t love data? If you’ve been following our Board meetings, you’ll know that we launched a new dashboard in September 2023 to provide a transparent look at our performance as a regulator. In each report, we have space to reflect on where we’re meeting internally or externally set performance benchmarks and where we have room for improvement.

What you aren’t seeing is all the backend work underway to build internal dashboards that let us monitor in real time how our work is being carried out and how we’re moving forward in meeting our benchmarks. This is a key component of our commitment to being an efficient and effective regulator that delivers timely results to those engaged in our processes.

Tying our performance together with the theme of engagement above, you might be surprised to hear that we received over 7,000 inquiries to our Practice Advisors last year. This is a huge volume of correspondence that we manage in order to help you navigate difficult practice questions, find the right resource, or understand what is expected of you. The overwhelming majority of these inquiries are responded to on the same day, even if just to say that we need to think about the tough questions you’re posing so we can come back to you with comprehensive support.

Entry-to-Practice

It’s been a challenging couple of years emerging from the disruption the pandemic caused to well-established entry-to-practice processes. Since then, the Ontario Clinical Exam has become a stable and reliable means of evaluating applicants for licensure and we’ve had over 1,600 sittings of the exam since it was launched in the fall of 2022.

The Board was provided with a robust update at its June 2024 meeting where an external evaluation confirmed the exam is working well (with room for development of course).

While there is more change to come on this front in the next year and beyond, we are working closely with our system partners to ensure there are clear and timely routes to licensure as we all collectively seek to support a healthcare system in distress. Keep an eye on our communications and Board materials for further updates on this front.

Looking Forward

Year two is already well underway. Moving forward we’ll continue to focus on regulatory excellence through strong corporate and governance structures that allow us to serve the public interest with transparency and accountability and in collaboration with the profession, the public, and our system partners. Our operating plan sets out a clear path for delivering on our strategic plan, which includes:

• Continuing to modernize our standards, informed by the model standards developed nationally and the feedback you provide during our consultations;
• Reviewing our processes and procedures to strive for efficiency in the way we do our work;
• Using data to support our regulatory decisions and provide you support in your practice;
• Overhauling our website so it’s easier to find the information needed, whether you are a PT, a patient, a prospective registrant, or a system partner;
• Supporting students and newcomers to the practice in this province through resources and outreach; and
• Building on our EDI assessment to develop and integrate EDI principles and strategies in all areas of our organization.

We’ve got a busy year ahead and I look forward to continuing to check back in with you as we move these initiatives forward.