Every 2 years World Physiotherapy holds a large international scientific congress, bringing the global community together. This year the World Physiotherapy Congress 2023 took place in Dubai, UAE, 2–4 June 2023. It offered an unparalleled opportunity to meet with partners, colleagues and friends from around the world. As usual the Physiopedia team were in attendance with multiple presentations and a stand in the exhibition hall.
The team presented workforce capacity building activities including formative work towards developing an International Rehabilitation and Training Toolkit (IRETT), work related to online learning pedagogy and development strategy, and learnings from last year’s Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Presentations included a focused symposium on Leveraging Collaborative Inter-Professional Education Strategies For Context Specific Workforce Development, a platform presentation on the 2022 MOOC Understanding Rehabilitation Needs of Displaced Persons and another platform to share experiences of gaining clinical skills and early leadership opportunities through virtual non-patient facing placements, as well as six poster presentations to share learnings related to understanding global workforce development needs, curriculum development in Ukraine, multimedia for online delivery of education, the importance of translated learning content and GESI (Gender Equity and Social Inclusion) sensitive care.
On the stand there was fun and laughter as we met colleagues for the first time since COVID-19, partners for the first ever time in person, and new friends that make up our global Physiopedia family. People from all over the world shared how they use Physiopedia and Physiopedia Plus (Plus) in their individual learning, their teaching and for strengthening their organisations. We love meeting people in person as it’s the only time we really get to delve into these super interesting stories of success. The event also gave us the opportunity to catch up with the international organisations that we work with around the world such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Federation of Occupational Therapists (WFOT), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Momentum Wheels for Humanity (MWH).
This year Physiopedia was represented by an international and interprofessional team. Their happiness, endless enthusiasm and great work was all well received, with one attendee sharing on Twitter that he was “learning a lot from this stellar group of [professionals] about the power of working interprofessionally”
