Celebrating a publication and student success!

Physiotherapists thoughts on supported self-management

Programme team members recently celebrated the publication of an article. This article was based on the honour’s dissertation of Brylee Orpwood. Brylee’s work was a great insight into how one group of health professionals, physiotherapists, think about self-management and supported self-management and how those thoughts change in response to their communities.

A quick summary of the article:

“Understanding New Zealand physiotherapist scholars’ philosophies and practices of supporting self-management: a qualitative study” Summary from the authors: Brylee, Mandy, Meredith, Donna and Leigh.

In this study we invited NZ physiotherapist scholars to talk with us. We wanted to talk with them about what they understood about their role in supported self-management.

We invited them because they had published articles about self-management, support for self-management or associated ideas. Fourteen physiotherapist scholars from around NZ agreed to be interviewed online.

The physiotherapist scholars told us:

That they valued supporting people’s own self-management work in their clinical practices.

They thought building relationship with the people they worked with was as important as encouraging self-management skills.

They thought that learning from other people who lived with similar conditions was a good way to learn how to do things to look after oneself.

We heard that their understanding of supported self-management was becoming broader.  

They also said there were challenges to being able to support someone’s self-management work because the support required is individual to a person.

They said the health system made it difficult to individualise support.

If you’d like to read more, you can freely access the full publication: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09638288.2026.2632938

Or to contact lead academic author: Leigh Hale leigh.hale@otago.ac.nz

Orpwood, B., Wilkinson, A., Perry, M., Keen, D., & Hale, L. (2026). Understanding New Zealand physiotherapy scholars’ philosophies and practices of supported self-management: a qualitative study. Disability and rehabilitation, 1-16.