By Joon Nah - Certified Vestibular Physiotherapist and Founder, Therapia

Physiotherapy is delivered in different ways for different reasons and can produce different outcomes. Traditionally physiotherapists worked in open settings, with overlapping patient treatment times, and relied heavily on the help of assistants and kinesiologists.

However change is happening.
Appointment times are getting longer. Fewer physiotherapists use aides, rather providing all aspects of treatment themselves. Patient privacy is moving care to individual treatment rooms.

These changes are driven by physiotherapists, patients, and government.
Patients are more discerning and do their homework by researching who and what is best suited for them. They expect more; better, faster, and in settings that are comfortable.
Physiotherapists rely more on evidence-based therapy. In other words physiotherapy approaches that have strong backing in scientific research. This means a shift towards care involving patient education, manual therapy, and exercise instruction, and less focus on electrical modalities such interferential current, ultrasound and lasers.
Changes to government health policy and budgets mean less and less funding available for public health care, particularly physiotherapy. The growing reality of a two tier health care system has private rehabilitation clinics becoming the norm, further increasing the availability of one-on-one physiotherapy services.

Ultimately this can result in more opportunities for better care.
What are the benefits of one-on-one treatment?

1. Strong patient-therapist relationships
   Opportunities to build rapport, improve communication, time to listen more, enable trust and foster empathy. Some argue this relationship “makes or breaks” whether a treatment plan succeeds or fails.
2. Therapeutic touch.
   The value of a hands-on approach to treatment is commonly agreed upon throughout the medical community and in research. One-on-one treatment allows therapeutic touch to be regularly and effectively utilized.
3. Exercise Compliance
   Sticking to your physiotherapy home exercises are prescribed is critical to optimizing recovery. The watchful eye of a physiotherapist can not only promote better compliance, but also proper form, and faster realization of when to progress or change programs.
4. Treatment plan management.
   More time with your physiotherapist, means a better understanding of the problem. It results in regular measures of progress and rapid identification of potential barriers. This way, when things are working, they can keep working, and alternatively things can be changed as soon as they are not.

With Therapia’s physiotherapists, one-one-one physiotherapy is a part of every treatment session. Combined with the convenience of treatment that comes to your home or work, and the options of choosing your ideal therapist, Therapia makes recovery easy and effective.

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