good quals

You really need to decide which you would prefer - therapy or fitness. There are many good vocational courses for general fitness and health promotion; however if you want to deal in therapy/rehabilitation (provided you mean musculoskeletal practise) I am a strong believer that you cannot learn these areas in a short amount of time and will need a university education. If by therapy you mean G.P. referral or cardiovascular rehab (at a low risk level) there are also vocational awards you can undertake.

The best advice I ever got was "think what type of people you would like to working with in ten years time" once you have this in mind you can find the correct courses.

What is Prehabilitation?

Prehab is a term used for exercises/drills that potentially may help the reduction of common/known injuries/dysfunctions for a given athlete/client before they happen. Looking at badminton this would be ankle and shoulder health specifically. You would cmplete additional exercises that would target better conditioning these areas.

My issue with prehab is that it is a term used for those already have injuries/dysfunction. If a training programme is complete for an athlete, these prehab areas will be addressed anyway. Plus how do we know what is going to happen. I know previous injury is a good indication of future issues so prehab exercises are not prehab if a reoccurance of the injury is present. If this happens then there has been mismanagement of that athlete!

Alex

I believe "prehab" doesn't necessarily relate to previous injury/disfunction their is plenty of literature today which does all the hard work 4 us and highlights the risk indicators in sport.

For e.g. if we have a winger in rugby clearly his/her demands suggest a high risk of hamstring injuries...

Therefore althought not injured previously if we include a prehab startegy surely we minimise potential risk of injury occuring which perhaps eludes to the notion of a throught conditioning program.

Thoughts...

Rehabuk

My point exactly. It is not prehab it is conditioning. Physical preparation includes conditioning the athlete for demands of the sport and potentially reducing the risk of non contact injuries. Prehab is a term that is thrown around suggesting more than what it actually is. Preparing an athlete physically includes ensuring the athlete has a potentially lower risk of hamstirng injuries. The notion to do prehab on hamstrings is crazy. Prehab is already within a programme but has been given a new fancy name for conditioning that already exists.

The point about the previous injury is that if an athlete has had a previous injury and they are doing prehab, how can it be - the injury has already occurred. It is either rehab in intial stages and low level conditioning or it is post rehab reconditioning.

An interesting line of thought raised here Alex, I suppose in theory Prehab is actually a subcategory of conditioning. The appearance of exercise rehabilitation as a specific role seems to have encouraged new terms to roles currently performed.

Incidently I was recently speaking to someone at the Universityof Bangor who mentioned BASES will be accreding exercise reahabilitation as a specific role, although I can only find accredited courses on the BASES website.

Has anyone heard of exercise rehabilitation as recognised/accredited role? it seems to me that physiotherapists are still the only recognised role in rehabilitation despite the various degree courses available now?

I dont even think it is even a sub category of conditioning. I know it is only a name (and shouldn't wind me up!) but why do we as an industry continue to rename areas that already exist?

BASRAT is a organisation that is trying to gain accreditation status. The website is http://www.basrat.org/ My younger brother is just completed a Sports Rehab degree but looks like he is going back to uni to study physio as sports rehabers dont seem to have the same credability or job prospects as physio's.

Alex

I am closely associated with BASRaT i think the problem with so called "accreditation " is it takes a number of years 4 HPC (Health Practioneers Council) to acredit any occupation both osteo and physio had similar problems with establishing themselves when they to were in there infancies which wasn't so long ago. I am adement that no other profesional recieves three years of fulltime education specifically tailored to both the rehab/prehab! of injured individuals.

The reasons why rehab therapists are still struggling 4 employment relates directly to a)politics to many people insecure in their knowledge base and threatened by change and b) education to the masses about the role of the rehab and not enough open minded people who's main focus is the care of the individual via a team (S/C,physio,rehab etc) approach(much like EIS) and not their own agenda.

Rehab uk

Rehab UK,

You mentioned "I am adement that no other profesional recieves three years of fulltime education specifically tailored to both the rehab/prehab! of injured individuals." But didn't mention which course does? I presume you mean physio/osteo but you seem to be argueing for rehab as a role? would you mind clarrifying - sorry to be a pain.

I think Alex's younger brother has the right Idea, I personally am sticking to the physiotherapy route despite a coupole of detours as there simply does not seem to be the jobs/recognition for exercise rehab.

I have previously looked at organisations such as BASRAT but feel as of yet they do not have the credability (or the recognition maybe a better term) to rely on - lets hope things improve!

There are several issues with graduate sports rehabilitors. The first is that it is not got the needed accreditation from HPC. Without this status, how can we as consumers/clients trust the level of expertise of the practitioner (I am not saying rehab is a cowboy outfit, far from it - I was thinking of completing the pst grad cert at St Marys). Look at sports therapy. You can do a 1 week course of a 3 year undergraduate degree and still call yourself a sports therapist. There is no quality control there and until rehab does through HPC accredition, then as a profession, you are going to struggle to get the recognition deserved.

Another issue is that not all rehab courses are/were single honours degrees. St Marys up to 2002 would only offer the degree as a joint honours and that was not necessarily with sports science. Looking at the courses offered now, there is still discrepancies with what each course offers. Plus there is variable amount of placements amoung the courses. Hull offers 2 placements over 2 semesters. Compare this to physio who's placement are far longer, then you have to question the consistancy across the course delivery sites. Also the number of hours undergrad rehabers do is far less than that of a physio per week - studying at uni and living with 2 girls who were doing the rehab course had around 14-16 hours a week of directed learning. Again compare that to physios who have closer to 25 hours. Until these inconsistancies are sorted, then there are always going to be sceptism about it.

It is not always the matter of having an open mind - I am aware of the need for such a position within physical preparation as potentially excellent rehabers will have a better understanding of high performance than an average physio. But an excellent physio will have that same understanding plus the benefit of the education and experience of other facets of physio (respiratory etc) which I know have come in useful while on training and Olympic holding camps.

With physio's as well, they tend to follow a structured progression of development from graduating to working within the NHS. Those who are successful within sports tend to have a sports medicine or sports physiotherapy MSc so again their understanding is taken to another level.