For me 2019 ended in the emergency room! Apart from a slightly annoying leg injury and a delayed end of year round up post all will be OK. For Physiopedia, it ended in a bit of a flurry, in fact with so much going on this year it was more like the conclusion of a whirlwind!
Let’s start by getting the data out of the way! 12 million people from every country in the world viewed over 30 million pages on Physiopedia in 2019, levels of website use that is unprecedented in our global profession! Physiopedia is the #1 international physiotherapy website but what is more impressive is that the site is ranked #54 in the SimilarWeb Health and Medicine category, out of all websites in the world! In 2019 we were humbled by the role Physiopedia now plays. Not only is it a great educational resource for physiotherapy professionals but also an amazing advocacy tool for our profession.
Talking of data, we spent a fair bit of time thinking about the future of our profession this year and produced a couple of short videos relating to how data may inform this. The first was for the WCPT Congress ‘Big Data’ focused symposium:
The other was a collaboration with the Australian Physiotherapy Council to celebrate their 50th birthday:
I cannot pretend to be able to imagine what Physiopedia will be doing on it’s 50th birthday. However, whilst thinking about the future of our profession we also thought a lot about the impact that Physiopedia has had on our profession so far and the contribution that it might make in the future. We build community, we educate and we advocate, this is the core of all that we do and this is all summarised on a new page that describes the Physiopedia impact.
This impact is only realised through the altruistic and tireless work of our very special team of volunteers. The team work extremely hard to build this valued professional resource for our global profession. They monitor and update content, they act as a sounding board for ideas and provide advice and feedback from the front line. They help us to share Physiopedia with the world. In February we welcomed 23 new volunteers to the team, making us a force of 65 people from 20 countries. We cannot thank them enough for contributing to the Physiopedia mission and if you get the chance you should thank them too, for without them Physiopedia would disappear!
It’s a very special occasion when the team gets to meet in person and in May this was at the WCPT Congress. This is always a special conference for us, as an international profession wide conference it gives us the opportunity to meet a broad range of our users and collaborators from all over the world. But having some of the team there too makes it all so much more fun. This year there was the added bonus of 5 presentations by the Physiopedia team in the conference programme.
Our educational gift this year came in the form of the free TBI online course. The course on the topic of traumatic brain injury was funded by a very generous private donation, and took place in October and November. 20,000 people registered for this course from nearly every country in the world making it our most popular open online course to date. It’s always a challenge to manage a course of this size but the feedback that we received highlights the impact that these courses have around the world and we would like to thank all those that participated in 2019. We’ve yet to analyse the rest of the course participation data but we anticipate publishing a fascinating report by the end of January here on Physiospot.
In December, after a long patient wait, we launched the new Physiopedia app. The app is free and brings all of Physiopedia’s articles, which have been beautifully optimised for mobile, to your fingertips. Yes, Physiopedia can now live in your pocket and be easily accessed wherever you go! Think of it as Physiopedia’s end of year gift to you. You’ll not be alone using it, there were over 10,000 downloads in just one week!!
This year Physiopedia was 10 years old. We didn’t like to make too much of a fuss as we are all simply too focussed on doing the best that we can to bring you a valuable professional resource. As a community edited resource it’s never going to be perfect or finished, but the older it gets the better it will be, the more people that join the editing efforts the better and more extensive the content will become.
In 2018 we realised just how important Physiopedia was to physiotherapists all over the world and this year we tried to make sense of the impact that it has had on our global profession. Our 2018/2019 Trustees report is shared here. In 2020 we, as a team, will work to achieve our vision of “a world where every person recognises the value of physiotherapy and has access to quality physiotherapy care” and FOCUS on our contributory mission to “provide universal and equitable access to all physiotherapy knowledge.”
In 2020 we will challenge ourselves to do better and we invite you to join us!
Physiopedia is a charity that relies on the global professional community for support. We are eternally grateful to our existing Partners and Volunteers and we would love for you to join the team. If you value Physiopedia please consider one of these options to provide support our activities in 2020:
- Become an editor of Physiopedia. Making content contributions are easy to do, everyone has knowledge to share;
- Encourage your employer and/or member organisation to become a Physiopedia Partner;
- Make an individual donation every little helps!
- Become a full member of Physioplus for your CE/CPD needs.