College Blog
By: Craig Roxborough, Registrar and CEO
As we head into the holiday season, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank you all for your continued engagement with the College and everything you do to provide high-quality care for patients.
I’d also like to highlight some of what we have planned for 2025.
New Website, More Engagement
After nearly a year of work behind the scenes, the College’s new website is officially live. Our ultimate goal with the new site is to make it easier for you to find what you need – whether it’s a specific resource to support you in your practice or step-by-step instructions on how to manage part of your registration.
The new site is user-friendly with easy navigation and search.
I’m particularly excited about its robust commenting feature. In addition to commenting on blogs and cases of the month, you’ll now also be able to leave public comments on consultations.
While we’ll continue to gather feedback through the traditional anonymous channels, the new commenting feature will allow you to weigh in on proposed changes in a public forum. This will enable you to engage with your peers on important questions about practice or changes happening at the College.
Our Communications team will be making continuous improvements to the new site in the months ahead. If you have any feedback on its content, design or functionality, they would be happy to hear from you. You can reach the Communications team at communications@collegept.org.
Further Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Work
Earlier this year, we released our first Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) report.
The report outlines the College’s actions and progress toward our EDI goals and created a foundation which we are now building on. In the coming year, we’re eager to share more about how we’re working to cultivate a culture of belonging.
Also in 2025, we will continue to have conversations about the role of data collection in our EDI work.
I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read and engage with my blog posts about this topic in the past year. In January, I wrote to you about why the College might want to collect additional demographic data from registrants, while in June I explored how we protect your privacy.
On this, as with all our EDI work, the College is committed to coming from a place of humility and with a focus on engagement and collaboration.
Continued Standards Roll-Out
With four more new standards approved at the Board meeting last week, we’re now more than halfway through reviewing and updating our standards.
I want to say thank you again to everyone who has taken the time to participate in consultations as part of this phased process to modernize our standards. Your input has been extremely valuable. Following each consultation, we’ve made changes based on the feedback we’ve heard. Your submissions have helped ensure the College’s standards continue to respond to changes in physiotherapy practice and public expectations.
At the same time, we’re working on updating our resources and guidance to accompany these standards and continue to support you in your practice.
We’ll also be hosting more webinars like the one we ran last month, which focused on the first group of updated standards.
Remember, if you have a question about the standards, you can always reach out to our Practice Advice Team.
Focus on Collaboration
As I’ve previously mentioned, one of the highlights of being Registrar is building relationships with physiotherapists and system partners. This includes meeting with professional associations and collectives, connecting with students and academics, checking in with districts and hospitals, and hearing from providers across the province, including in remote areas of the North.
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.
Recently we invited a group of internationally educated physiotherapists to join a focus group to share their experience transitioning to practice in Ontario. We recognize they face unique challenges on their journey to get licensed and ready to practice. By hearing about their experiences and perspectives, we gain valuable insight to help us find ways to better support internationally trained physiotherapists in the future. We look forward to continuing to engage with this group in 2025.
I hope to continue to meet and connect with many of you through various presentations, meetings and webinars in the new year.
I’m also looking forward to attending the OPA’s InterACTION Conference again in March.
Have a safe and happy holiday season; wishing you all the best in the new year.
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