Successful Physical Therapist

What makes a good physical therapist? Is it the schooling one has to go through to become certified? Or does being a successful physical therapist rely more on personality traits and values one holds? My goal in this paper was to find the truth behind what makes a good physical therapist by interviewing actual physical therapists and reading academic journals and studies to see what others have said about this subject. Currently to become a physical therapist, one has to go through almost eight years of schooling: four for an undergrad and another four for PT school (Jette). When I interviewed Jimmy Phillips, a practicing physical therapist in Murfreesboro, I asked him how important college really was for a physical therapist. Jimmy responded
They had questionnaires and interviews of the students, and then classified the behaviors into categories such as poor communication, poor knowledge, and unprofessional. These specific behaviors were looked into as the clinical instructors determined that these were necessary to succeed as a physical therapist. This study makes sense, as how could one be a good physical therapist if he or she is unable to properly communicate to a patient what needs to be done in order for him or her to recover? Communication also ties in with how well you may work with your peers, and what you are able to learn from them. As Christie mentioned, being able to learn from your peers to better yourself is very important in physical therapy because you won’t know everything no matter how much schooling you go
They also interviewed and studied some “average” physical therapists to see if there were any behavioral traits they were missing that the experts had. There were six experts and six average physical therapists that were all interviewed and surveyed and the results were collected. The findings show that the “experts” were much more likely to call themselves extroverts and have a higher commitment to professional growth than those who were considered average. Experts also tended to have better utilization of colleagues and pattern of delegation of car to support staff, both signs of being able to work well with