For Physiotherapy education in Nigeria to thrive and be at par with its peers around the world, it must embrace the emerging technologies, Professor E.B John of York College, University of Pennsylvania, United States of America, has argued.

He spoke at the 5th Annual Memorial Lecture of Professor Vincent Nwuga organized by the NWUGA Physiotherapy Foundation in collaboration with the Department of Physiotherapy, Bayero University, Kano on 26th September, 2023 held at Faculty of Dentistry, Lecture Theatre.

He said everything that is affecting the Nigerian society also affects its physiotherapy education system, adding that these circumstances and events have not given us a pause to re-imagine, re-package and re-calibrate our education system.

The guest lecturer argued that unlike the Global Positioning System (GPS) that checks its relative positioning of all the satellites with the earth and ground stations at least once a day and make minor corrections, our education system has not kept up with these moving parts. He said it is therefore a time to crank up our Physiotherapy education GPS and it is time to rise and self-correct the positioning error and forge ahead to update and upgrade the education system bringing it up to the 21st century.

“Iam here to announce that we are ready and willing to rally together and correct our positioning errors in our national GPSes, change courses and start playing catch up with the rest of the developed world in Physiotherapy,” he said.

Speaking on the reforms of clinical practice industry, Professor John said the way our students are trained as clinicians especially looking at the DPT programmes that are evolving, their primary care and physiotherapy diagnostic clinical reasoning skills need to be revolutionized. He added that our clinical education must mirror the changing face of healthcare and medicine, noting that the future includes personalized care through analysis of genetic composition of the patient and tailor making their rehabilitation plans.

He advised that since the coming of highly sophisticated technologically driven rehabilitation practice will be too expensive for individual business owners to have enough capital to invest, there is the need for collaboration with government and private sector investors to create major rehabilitation centres where most of what he called rehabilitation diagnostic and evaluation centres can then be directed to local physiotherapy for intervention and follow up.

Prof John while commending the NWUGA Foundation for immortalizing the late Prof Boniface for inspiring the physiotherapists, challenged colleagues in Nigeria to either repair, overhaul or completely install new GPSes for proper global positioning of Physiotherapy profession so that we are not left behind the rest of the world.

The Vice Chancellor, Professor Sagir Adamu Abbas, who was the special guest of honour at the occasion, said it was a worthwhile for Nwuga Foundation Society to organize this lecture which was titled: Repositioning and Nigeria’s Physiotherapy Education and its Clinical Practice Industry into the 21st Century.

The Vice Chancellor, who was represented by the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Management Services, Professor Mahmoud Umar Sani said bringing the annual lecture to BUK for the first time showed the confidence the foundation had on BUK. He said  the lecture was apt  and timely due to its importance in revolutionizing the physiotherapy education in Nigeria.

He said Bayero University has been selected as the best university in Nigeria in terms of international visibility and fourth best overall by the British Times Higher Education, noting that the College of Health Sciences has contributed immensely in this regard. He said the University management would continue to support the college to improve its teaching, learning, research and collaboration with medical and health programmes across the world for better and efficient service delivery.