Sustainable undergraduate education and professional competency.

their tradition, is to develop in their students the cognitive and practical breadth required to function as competent practitioners immediately on graduation, with the capacity to continue to learn and develop. As schools within universities, they also seek to provide students with broad educational experiences, assisting them to develop generic skills such as independent learning, teamwork, responsibility towards other people, problem solving abilities and the like. Graduates from the Australian Schools of Physiotherapy are registered to practise by their respective State Registration Boards. Increasingly, this registration will be on the basis of their course being accredited against criteria determined by the Australian Council of Physiotherapy Regulating Authorities (ACOPRA). These criteria were developed in the early 1990s and include, if only by implication and tradition, the expectation articulated by the World Confederation for Physical Therapy that entry-level physiotherapy curricula will allocate a minimum of 1000 hours to supervised clinical education. Graduates from accredited courses are also expected to attain a range of minimum competencies as defined by the Australian Physiotherapy Competency Standards document (Liston et al 1994). In New Zealand, a similar process of accreditation exists. In a standard four year program, typical of Australia and New Zealand, each student spends approximately 32 weeks each year in full time attendance at university. In most cases, four weeks per year is dedicated to examinations and a further two weeks may be reserved for pre-exam study. For most undergraduate programs, students will spend between 20 and 25 hours per week in face-to-face contact (in lectures, tutorials, practical classes, etc.). These contact hours are much higher than in typical non-clinical degree programs, which have between 10 and 14 hours of class contact. One reason for the much higher number of contact hours is the need for physiotherapy students to practise clinical skills under direct supervision, to ensure safety and effectiveness prior to the student treating patients in the clinic. During clinical placements, students typically are expected to be on site for 30 to 35 hours per week. Clinical education occupies around 30 weeks of most undergraduate programs, equating to at least 1000 hours. On the basis of this formula, the residual " teaching " period, after deduction of the clinical education, contains a total of between 1500 and 1700 non-clinical hours. Not all of this " university " time can be devoted exclusively to the study and practice of physiotherapy-specific content. The student requires …