Ethiopia had only 17 doctors of physical therapy for an estimated 105 million people in 2019, Al Jazeera reported from Addis Ababa.
Balcha Hospital, run by the Russian Red Cross, in Addis Ababa, January 2018 (A.Savin, Wikimedia Commons, Free Art License) [file photo]
Physiotherapy is still treated as a luxury in Ethiopia, Al Jazeera’s Leah Harding reported. There are very few therapists for tens of millions of people, and not all of those practising are fully qualified. Harding met the country’s first class of doctors of physical therapy as they tried to change that.
The 17 are the graduates of Addis Ababa University’s Advanced Standing Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) programme, described by its backers as the first doctoral physiotherapy course in Africa. The university developed it with Regis University in Denver, Colorado, and the U.S.-based Jackson Clinics Foundation. The first cohort, all registered physiotherapists with bachelor’s degrees, graduated in December 2017, every one of them with distinction, according to the foundation.
The programme’s organisers say the graduates are trained as primary-care providers who can prescribe medication, order and read X-rays and treat trauma cases. About half of the teaching came from Addis Ababa University medical school faculty and the rest from American and European volunteers, with the aim of handing the course entirely to Ethiopian staff, led by the first 17 graduates.
A peer-reviewed paper on the programme says the partners spent about six years planning it, slowed by frequent changes of deans and directors at the university’s College of Health Sciences. The first cohort was meant to become the core faculty for a future six-year entry-level DPT degree, and a leadership curriculum was built into the course so that graduates could advance a profession that is still young in Ethiopia.
Sources: Al Jazeera, Jackson Clinics Foundation, PubMed Central, World Physiotherapy