My name’s Carolyn Roskell, I’m the Programme Lead for the MSc Physiotherapy (pre-registration)
programme, which I have been for about the past three years and I’ve been involved
with the programme for many years, so I’m very experienced and have seen many students
come through the programme and successfully graduate.
This programme offers a great combination of academic study with practical experience
and experience within the clinical setting and those three areas together give a great
diversity of experience.
Some students naturally feel better in the academic setting, some automatically take
to the clinical setting and find that that’s the area where they’re able to excel.
So the balance between these three elements is what makes our programme unique.
We also offer in particular a good research experience where the students are able to
take a research project, from an active research project that’s running in the school, and
that really strengthens the academic base that the students are able to bring to their
clinical studies.
The programme’s aimed at anybody that’s interested in becoming a qualified physiotherapist
within the UK because once you’ve finished this course you’re eligible to apply for
registration with the Health and Care Professions Council and the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy.
This is a particularly important topic for postgraduate students.
We recognise that a lot of postgraduate students need to think about their own personal finances
coming on a course such as this and therefore we do try to structure the timetable in such
a way that there are days out where they can, for example, fulfil their other requirements.
So we’ll probably be seeing at the beginning of the programme a maximum of four days a
week contact time but we’ll progress to maybe three days a week so that students have
enough time to be able to meet their other requirements and complete the independent
study that’s required as part of a Master’s course.
The course itself precedes over two years and during that time there will also be blocks
of clinical placements where the students will be working four days a week on a clinical
placement, except for one of those placements where they will work five days a week just
to get a taste for what it’s really like to work in a workplace.
Anybody that does this course, through being registered with the Health and Care Professions
Council, will be legally allowed to work as a physiotherapist in the UK.
This opens an enormous range of doors, for example a lot of students will graduate and
go and work in the NHS, however there are career opportunities available within sport,
within industry, within occupational health and other areas as the area of physiotherapy
really has wide application right across many sectors.
Students should choose this course if they are passionately committed to becoming a qualified
physiotherapist that may work for example in the UK in the NHS or the independent sector,
or would like to take that qualification abroad and work in other countries because the two
years Master’s qualification is portable and is accepted in a wide range of countries
around the world.
You should choose the University of Birmingham if you’re particularly committed to delivering
a patient-centred approach to care where caring and compassionate physiotherapy is important
in the way we teach and the way in which we go about delivering our work.
You should also the choose the University of Birmingham if you have a particular interest
in research and actually interested in developing the academic base of physiotherapy to support
the care and compassionate approach that we advocate.
I love teaching on this course because the students that come on it are really passionate
and motivated individuals.
They work hard, they really are interested in being able to apply their knowledge within
a clinical setting so we try to work with real life patient material in the classroom
to try and imagine what it’s going to be like working with real people with real problems
and trying to find solutions to those problems through the work that we do in the classroom.
The enthusiasm and motivation that the students have for that is great and we really, really
value that.