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N. Pinsault1, J.-F. Dumas1, A. Guillaume1, P. Mathieu1
1French National Council of Physiotherapists, Demography Observatory, Paris, France
Background: On January 1, 2018, 86,693 physiotherapists were registered on the Order's roll, i.e. 129 professionals per 100,000 inhabitants, which corresponds to the European average density (the lowest being around 60/100,000 and the highest at 250/100,000). Among them, 12,677 worked exclusively as employees and the others in private practice. Even if the French Ministry of Health recently indicated that the supply of physiotherapy care was increasing faster than needs, data provided does not reflect the perceived situation, particularly for the employed.
Purpose: To make an inventory of the salaried physiotherapy practice determining the rate of unfilled positions according to the status and the size of the institution, the rate of change in the number of posts budgeted between 2015 and 2018, the rate of positions frozen or transformed between 2015 and 2018 and the overall and median turnover rates.
Methods: A descriptive study by questionnaire was carried out from May to June 2018 on establishments employing at least one physiotherapist. Our source population for the survey was comprised of all the establishments (n= 3820) registered in the French National Order of Physiotherapy’s Board as employing at least one physiotherapist. From this target population we created a polling sample representative of territorial distribution and size of establishments. The sample thus constituted consisted of 567 establishments distributed over the 100 French departments.
Results: Of the 567 establishments to be surveyed, we collected 240 valid questionnaires (response rate of 40.2%). More than half of the responding institutions were public, the rest being equally divided between three categories of private healthcare establishments. Our results show an unfilled budgeted position rate of 15.3% in institutions employing at least one physiotherapist. Interestingly, no statistical difference has been observed for unfilled position rate across different healthcare institution status. However, we can see a difference between smaller institutions since those employing up to 5 Full-time equivalents (FTEs), with an unfilled position rate of 26.7%, and those employing more than 5 FTEs demonstrated an unfilled position rate of only 14.5%.
Conclusion(s): This survey is the first in France to question the rate of unfilled physiotherapist positions in institutions. Thus we cannot know the dynamics of this phenomenon. This situation is all the more worrying as salaried practice is at the forefront of the training of future professionals and of new roles that physiotherapists could play. Another interesting result is the number of budgeted positions between 2015 and 2018, up by 1.47%. While we can be pleased that this trend is on the rise, we can wonder about its scale at a time when the World Health Organization has raised awareness towards rehabilitation needs by 2030 and recommends strong action by public health actors. In addition, 6.5% of the posts budgeted in 2015 were frozen or converted for the benefit of other professionals. For every physiotherapist position created four have disappeared.
Implications: In the context of the recent law “my health 2022" wanted by the French government to regulate the offer of care in France, we believe that these data could feed into the debate.
Funding, acknowledgements: This study was carried out within the framework of the Observatory of Demography of the french Order of the physiotherapists
Keywords: Demography, National survey, Salaried physiotherapy
Topic: Globalisation: health systems, policies & strategies
Did this work require ethics approval? No
Institution: N/A
Committee: N/A
Reason: Demographic study not involving the human person
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
