A new campaign from APTA and Hyperice encourages PTs, PTAs, and others to be attentive to their own physical and emotional health.
Physical therapy can change lives — but only if PTs and PTAs haven’t been drained of their passion. A new APTA initiative in partnership with Hyperice wants to help the physical therapy community hold on to that passion through self-care.
Called Fit for Practice, the recently launched project will offer a range of resources to members and nonmembers aimed at helping individuals take the needed time to look at their own health — physical and emotional — and take steps to improve it, if needed.
Drew Contreras, PT, DPT, APTA’s vice president of clinician integration and innovation, heads up the program. During remarks at the APTA Future of Physical Therapy Summit on Sept. 13, he laid out the urgent need for action.
“We are reaching an inflection point in our profession, where our clinicians are exhausted and words like ‘burnout’ and ‘compassion fatigue’ aren’t even enough to describe the scope of what we are facing,” Contreras said. “Clinicians are walking away from the profession, not because of salary or positions, but because they are exhausted.”
The campaign begins in mid-October. Anchored in a webpage on apta.org, the program will offer weekly content including webinars, blog posts, CEU courses, social media engagement opportunities, and articles focused on four major areas of well-being: movement, resilience, restoration, and practice health. In collaboration with Hyperice, the effort will include contributions from more than a dozen entities within and outside the physical therapy industry.
