78 Personal and professional scope of practice

The purpose of this activity is to introduce the idea of a personal scope of practice, and to think of the ways that it overlaps with your professional scope.

We’re all familiar with the professional scope of practice that gives us license to work as physiotherapists. It defines the specific tasks, knowledge and attributes that are demanded of registered physiotherapists in each locality.

But people rarely realise that they also have a ‘personal’ scope of practice. This represents the personal skills and attributes, values and beliefs that you bring to work. It’s what makes you distinctive as a therapist.

Often the two scopes overlap; especially in new graduates who haven’t yet developed a strong sense of personal professional identity.

But sometimes the two zones can be quite spaced out; forcing the therapist to question whether they are actually a good fit for their profession.

This activity explores how closely your personal scope aligns with your professional scope.

Activity

1. Draw two overlapping circles on a piece of paper like the diagram at the top (or print off this Word version). One circle represents your professional scope of practice, the other is your personal scope. There should be a zone of overlap between the two.
2. Now go online and download a copy of your professional scope of practice. From this document fill one zone with descriptions of what your profession demands of you.
3. In the opposite zone, list all of your personal traits, skills, experiences, knowledges, values and beliefs – the things that you value the most as a professional
4. Where there are commonalities, put these in the overlapping zone in the centre

Analysis (don’t read this until you’ve done all of the steps above)

On the surface this sounds like a relatively straightforward exercise but, in fact, it’s anything but.
Look closely at the descriptions in each zone and where you’ve placed things.
In the central overlapping zone, for instance, you might have written ‘good communication’ or ‘safe practice’ because these matter to you and  the regulatory authority.
But people often write unusual things in the two outside zones.
For instance, you might have written ‘care and compassion’ and ‘strong interest in pain management’ in your personal zone. But by placing these there you’re saying that these things are not a concern for your profession (or you’d have put them in the overlapping zone in the middle).
Similarly, you might have written ‘knowledge of anatomy, physiology, etc.’ and ‘continuing professional development’ in the professional scope zone, but decided these things were of no real interest to you. But can that be true?

So now revisit the diagram and move things around so that it’s a full and accurate picture of where you overlap with your profession and where you differ.

This is a much harder task than it seems because although you clearly are your own person, it’s hard to acknowledge the things your profession wants from you that you don’t actually care about. Equally it can be painful to realise there are things that are core to your being as a physiotherapist but your profession doesn’t acknowledge.

Often, the differences between these two are seen as threats (“what if the Board finds out I don’t care about anatomy and strikes me off!”), but in truth innovation and creativity begin where there are differences. So these zones of difference should be the starting place for conversations about how physiotherapy might change.

This exercise hopefully allows you to see how you are different, and perhaps opens a door for your own act of thinking otherwise.