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.
It is is great that you are working on this. In the “Active Response” I think it is important to look beyond “Recognizing, addressing, and taking steps to prevent discrimination, inequities, and harm in practice” to being very intentional in working towards true social justice, that aims to dismantle the deep inequities in the health care system, including in our profession.
Another standard ? do we really need it?. I have been a PT for 40 years, 30 in Canada, I have work in few places with lots of different PTs from different countries. I have never witnessed any inappropriate behaviour or , comment from any of them. The idea of tolerance, inclusion has been so widely and thoroughly discussed in media and our work places that it does not need any more additional explanations and regulations. It has been widely adopted and respected by all health practitioners. For the last 30 years I have been reading all college disciplinary committee proceedings and have never read any complain about that issue. So why the college sees the need to regulate that subject any further? The issue that I see with the college is the ongoing need to control and regulate all aspects of its members life, believes and thoughts. I find the college overreaching its mandate, and try to control what we think ,what we say, how we say, what we believe in. The college is even trying to put words in our mouths to make sure we say politically and socially accepted believes. And most of the time we follow that expectations. I think enough is enough . We are educated adults, do not treat us as children that need constant cueing how to behave . The college is so much into inclusion and tolerance but your are included only if you believe in the college narrative . So called Canadian freedom of speech is only a myth. The situation right now very strongly reminds me situation I escaped in socialist eastern Europe. The College often warns us about crossing boundaries. In my opinion this is what the college is doing very often. In summation what I try to say, we agree with all the recommended expectations and requirements but leave as alone . Stop creating Policed state of College of Physiotherapist.