Physical Therapy Doctoral Degree Program at UNM

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>> BETH JONES: It’s certainly novel for us. We have never done it this way before.
In the past they had anatomy in the summer. And then they would start the evaluation procedures
with orthopedics in the fall. And my colleague Ron Andrews would say that he’d get to the
point of teaching the hand, and they hadn’t seen anything about the anatomy of the hand
in six months.
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>>RON ANDREWS: And the theory was that it’s a little more efficient and maybe more reinforcement
as we went through it where we’re not repeating content to kind of catch things up or address
pre-load information for a given area. We’re kind of doing it all at once. So I think it’s
a little more efficient theoretically. It makes sense to kind of address all those things
at once.
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>>BETH JONES: The thing about evaluation, you have to be able to know your anatomy.
Well hopefully they’ve got a foundation that then they can build upon in the evaluation
versus relearning it all over again a few months later.
>>RON ANDREWS [NATURAL SOUND TEACHING CLASS]: If I pull and it really feels rock solid,
I mean, it doesn’t come forward…
>>ERYN PAETZ: Just having anatomy with ortho and other classes you see things over and
over again and you really get it in your head and you can connect things. It’s not just
broken up and you have to go back and remember, OK, why am I doing this?
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>>BETH JONES: We were losing some of the best New Mexico students to other programs across
the country because they offered a doctorate and we did not. So we knew to be competitive
and to keep our students in state, we needed to make that transition.
>>ERYN PAETZ [NATURAL SOUND]: This is loose. It’s a big-time difference.
>>JENNY SMITH: Part of physical therapy is trying to move more toward direct access for
physical therapists, so in order to allow that we need to have a lot more of the differential
diagnosis and imaging. We need to know what else can go wrong with the body, not just
muscular skeletal stuff. So that’s a lot of what I think the doctorate curriculum incorporates.
>>RON ANDREWS: The intent ultimately was to provide a little bit more complete practitioner
if you will, perhaps someone who was able to screen and be an entry point in the medical
field, especially for someone with muscular skeletal problems. And so, in order to keep
up a high applicant pool and to keep the quality of our graduates up, we needed to make that
switch as well. The intent is really to have a little broader practitioner and a little
more skilled person coming out.
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