The Department of Physical Therapy & Rehabilitation Science was established in 2018 and hosts the first academic entry to practice program for the profession of physiotherapy in the State of Qatar.
The acting Head of the Department is Dr. Linzette Morris and our full-time faculty are internationally educated physiotherapists who bring a wide range of experience to their teaching and research. We work closely with the professional community and offer a contemporary and forward-thinking curriculum.
The 4-year BSc program has been established to contribute to the building of the healthcare workforce consistent with the National Development Strategy. It will educate Qatari and resident students in Qatar to become physiotherapists who are capable of autonomous practice. We are committed to educating the next generation of physiotherapy leaders promoting the development of the profession in Qatar.
What is physiotherapy?
According to the World Confederation for Physical Therapy, physiotherapists provide services that develop, maintain and restore people’s maximum movement and functional ability. They can help people at any stage of life, when movement and function are threatened by ageing, injury, diseases, disorders, conditions or environmental factors.
Physiotherapists help people maximize their quality of life, looking at physical, psychological, emotional and social wellbeing. They work in the health spheres of promotion, prevention, treatment/intervention, habilitation and rehabilitation.
Physiotherapists are qualified and professionally required to:
- Undertake a comprehensive examination/assessment of the patient/client or needs of a client group
- Evaluate the findings from the examination/assessment to make clinical judgments regarding patients/clients
- Formulate a diagnosis, prognosis and plan
- Provide consultation within their expertise and determine when patients/clients need to be referred to another healthcare professional
- Implement a physical therapist intervention/treatment programme
- Determine the outcomes of any interventions/treatments
- Make recommendations for self-management.
Mission
The mission of the BSc PT program is to improve the health care in Qatar by preparing knowledgeable, service-oriented, self-assured, adaptable, socially-sensitive and reflective practitioners by:
- Providing graduates with learning experience that promotes excellence through interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation in education and service
- Engaging in research and scholarly activities that advance physical therapy practice.
- Graduating qualified physical therapy practitioners who are able to apply critical and integrative thinking and lifelong learning to render independent judgments concerning patient/client needs that are supported by evidence in an ethically and culturally sensitive manner.
Vision
Our vision is to educate the next generation of physiotherapist leaders and our curriculum aligns with the core values described in the Qatar University’s Strategic Plan:
"excellence, academic freedom, innovation, integrity, diversity, and social responsibility"
Educational Objectives
Our graduates will demonstrate:
- Excellent communication skills that empower, motivate and evoke positive health behaviours;
- An understanding the diversity of the lived health experience and how this knowledge informs their practice and
- Knowledge of where they, as individual practitioners, and the professional community collectively, can influence individual and population health.
We will develop graduates who:
- Employ an evidence-based, patient-centered approach to the examination and evaluation of individuals living with conditions affecting movement;
- Who are skilled in the observation and analysis of human movement across the lifespan and
- Who use a biopsychosocial model to consider how limitations in an individual’s movement can impact quality of life and engagement in society.
We will facilitate, educate and empower our graduates to be:
- Competent evidence based-practitioners.
- Critical consumers of research.
- Brokers of knowledge translation.
- Capable and confident researchers.
- Generators new knowledge through the scholarship of discovery, integration, and application.
- Innovators and entrepreneurial thinkers in development and delivery of healthcare.
- Future leaders for and of the profession.
- Advocates for their patients and the health care system.
- Emotionally and culturally intelligent individuals & physiotherapists.
- Individuals with mindsets that embrace the wider influences on physiotherapy.
- Individuals willing and able to shape the future of the profession and healthcare.