College Blog
Across the health-care system, there’s a growing understanding of how discrimination and systemic barriers affect the care someone receives.
Whether it’s overt discrimination that ignores calls for help in an emergency room or subtle comments that make a patient feel unsafe and hesitant to disclose information, these experiences directly impact patient safety and outcomes.
Health-care providers and patients are driving these conversations, but they hit at the core of our mission as a regulator – ensuring all Ontarians have access to competent, safe and ethical physiotherapy care.
Fundamentally, this work is about building a safer, more inclusive health-care system – and physiotherapists understand the basics of it intuitively.
You know that providing high-quality care means seeing your patient as an individual and working to meet their unique needs. And you work with patients from a wide variety of backgrounds every day.
As a regulator, we want to support you in continuing to provide excellent person-centred care, while we collectively seek to address harm caused by discrimination and systemic barriers.
This is why we’re developing a Health Equity and Anti-Discrimination Standard.
The standard, which is in the early stages of development, will bring together concepts like trauma-informed care, non-discrimination and cultural humility, and establish clear expectations.
Many of the principles we’ve identified so far already appear in the College’s existing standards, guidance, and professional expectations. In fact, physiotherapists use them every day. However, part of what the new standard will do is present them in a more cohesive and accessible way to help illustrate how they apply in practice.
In this blog post, I want to introduce you to how we’re approaching the development of the standard and invite your input.
Proposed Foundational Principles
Right now, the College is working on developing a draft standard.
Based on research into similar initiatives and early conversations with partners like the Citizen Advisory Group and the College’s Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Indigenization Focus Group, we are grounding our work in six foundational principles:
Dignity, respect, and non-discrimination
Recognizing the inherent dignity of all individuals and ensuring physiotherapists provide care that is respectful, inclusive, and free from discrimination.
Person-led care and shared decision-making
Working in partnership with patients by respecting their goals, preferences, identities, and lived experiences throughout the course of care.
Awareness of personal bias and reflective practice
Engaging in ongoing self-reflection to recognize and address biases, assumptions, and behaviours that may influence care.
Cultural safety, humility, and building trust
Approaching patients with openness and humility, fostering trust, and creating care environments where individuals feel safe and respected.
Active response to discrimination and harm
Recognizing, addressing, and taking steps to prevent discrimination, inequities, and harm in practice.
Trauma-informed care
Recognizing that the experiences of trauma can affect how people engage with health care, and responding in ways that promote safety and trust.
We Want to Hear From You
As I mentioned, the Health Equity and Anti-Discrimination Standard is currently in the initial stages of development. But I wanted to share our work on this project so far to keep you informed and invite early feedback.
We expect to open the draft standard to broad public consultation in the spring, but you don’t have to wait until then to share your perspective.
If you have any feedback about the principles, or things you think should be covered in the standard, we’d like to hear from you.
You can send comments, questions and suggestions to our Policy Team at consultation@collegept.org. Staff will read and consider every piece of feedback.
As we work towards our spring consultation goal, we’ll continue to engage directly with patients, physiotherapists, and organizations with expertise in health equity and anti-discrimination to ensure our work is informed by these important perspectives.
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