Attitudes of physiotherapy students towards people with disabilities : the effects of the curriculum of the Satakunta University of Applied Science

Abstract

The attitude of health care professionals toward people with disabilities has been an important area of research in the last decades. In fact, people with disabilities address the negative attitudes of the professionals, as being one of the main barriers to a successful delivery of healthcare services. Students are the future professionals, and it is luckily that the values and the professional skills that they will gain during their education, will potentially affect their working life, both in their knowledge and in their attitudes. It is therefore necessary to evaluate the impact and the quality that those study´s programs have on the students´ attitudes. Satakunta University of Applied Sciences (SAMK) has been recognized as a regional promoter of physical activity for the population with disabilities. It is known for its unique study program in Physiotherapy, which give the students plenty of opportunities to closely interact with people with disabilities, together with theoretical and practical courses in adapted physical activities, functional devices, and accessibility. The purpose of this study-based Bachelor´s Thesis was to explore the extent to which, the curriculum in Physiotherapy at SAMK, can ultimately result in an improvement of the students´ attitudes towards people with disabilities. The author strongly believes in the need of investigating more on the factors that can affect positively on the attitudes of the students of SAMK, whose results can potentially serve as guidelines that could be implemented in the curriculum of the health care related degree programs in other Universities, in order to foster positive attitudes on a larger scale. The research was conducted using both quantitative and qualitative research methodological approaches. An online questionnaire to the physiotherapy students at SAMK was administered by the author, who gained quantitative data that were analyzed statistically to measure the impact of studying in SAMK on the students. In addition, the questionnaire included the Attitude Towards Disabled People scale (ATDP), which was used to measure the attitudes of the students. Qualitative data were collected by performing individual interviews to post graduate students. As the results showed, studying physiotherapy in SAMK does facilitate the improvement of the students´ attitudes towards people with disabilities. The main contributing factors for those changes were identified in the courses and activities that involved a close interaction with people with disabilities, in the adequate knowledge about functional devices, accessibility and adapted physical activity, and in the positive attitudes of the teachers themselves.