When we first discussed the Physiopedia project back in 2007 we wanted to build Wikipedia for the physiotherapy profession. We knew that we wanted to involve all physiotherapists from all over the world, build a resource that contained all physiotherapy knowledge and make it available for everyone to access. After five years we feel that we are on a good path to realising this vision. However our vision has evolved, now we want to make a real difference, via this resource we want to contribute to global health. After several iterations the Physiopedia mission to “contribute to global health through universal access to physiotherapy knowledge” was settled upon in 2012. So the question arises, how can the physiotherapy profession contribute to global health and how can we use Physiopedia to make that contribution? To answer this question we realised that the first thing that we have to do is have an understanding of global health.
To answer this question Tony and I have signed up for an open online course with the University of Geneva, Global Health: An Interdisciplinary Overview. We are both hoping to further our understanding of global health and be able to relate this to the Physiopedia project. I will be initiating my appearance in the Voices column of Physiospot to post my reflections following each week of the course. Tony will be adding comments and contributing to any discussion on each of these posts. Our hope is that we will generate some interesting discussion among our community enabling us to direct Physiopedia in a way that we can work towards our mission and make it relevant.