The World Health Organization says regular physical activity helps prevent and treat noncommunicable diseases such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and some cancers. Physical activity also helps prevent hypertension and obesity and can improve mental health, quality of life and wellbeing.
We support our member organisations in promoting the role physiotherapists can play in helping people become more active, in order to prevent these diseases.
We also work with other international organisations to make sure the voice of physiotherapy is heard, and its benefits promoted, as part of the debate to increase physical activity.
Advice and support for member organisations
We provide advice to our member organisations to help them make the case in their own country and territory for the physiotherapy profession. We help them place physiotherapy as a profession that offers experts in functional movement, and physiotherapists as highly qualified experts who can offer advice appropriate to an individual's ability and goals.
World PT Day was established in 1996 to raise awareness around the world about the crucial contribution physiotherapists make to society, enabling people to be mobile, well, and independent. World PT Day takes place on 8 September.
We are part of a global movement to increase physical activity
We work at a global level to promote the value of physiotherapy as a key part of increasing physical activity.
We are one of the health-related professional associations working with the World Health Organization to build the active societies envisaged in the Global Action Plan on Physical Activity 2018-30.
The plan aims for a 15 per cent relative reduction in the global prevalence of physical inactivity in adults and adolescents by 2030. It also suggests that, in addition to the personal impact of inactivity on an individual's health, between one to three per cent of national health care expenditures are attributable to physical inactivity.
