Looking Back: ENPHE Seminar 2025 - The Future of Physiotherapy Education: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities

ENPHE held its 2025 Seminar in Breda, the Netherlands, between the 10th and the 12th. The event was kindly hosted by the Department of Physiotherapy of the Avans University of Applied Sciences. This Seminar successfully gathered an inspiring and motivated community of physiotherapy educators, researchers, and students to share their knowledge, insights, and experiences, and collaborate for a better future within physiotherapy education.

Overview of the Seminar

For three days, attendees had the opportunity to participate in a wide range of activities, including keynote speeches, working group sessions, presentations, social activities and networking moments. The theme of this year's Seminar was "The Future of Physiotherapy Education: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities", which inspired important conversations about the progress, trends and expectations of physiotherapy education. We counted with over 160 participants from more than 20 different countries.

Keynote Speech

The Seminar was enriched by an inspiring Keynote from Peter Verkoeijen that left participants with valuable insights for Physiotherapy Education. Peter is a professor of educational psychology and applied sciences, and a researcher working at Avans University of Applied Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Selflex. His keynote session focused on self-regulated learning in higher education. It illustrated the relevance of this topic in current educational practices with insightful research, and provided listeners with proven tools, techniques and actions to improve learning performance and efficiency for students and educators.

This speech provided valuable takeaways and an important glimpse into how physiotherapy in higher education is evolving to address current and future challenges faced by teachers and students.

About the Working Group Sessions

The Emergent Topics - AI

During the Seminar, the Emergent Topics group focused on exploring the workflows in integrating AI into education. The group also discussed and reflected on the future of the emergent topics working group, a conversation that created space for the development of possible new emergent topics in physiotherapy, considering that AI is now a very established topic within the field. 

In relation to current and future developments for this group, they have been working on surveys for teachers and students in regards to AI usage. The group will also present the results of their use of AI surveys at the World Physio Conference. Moreover, they have organised a BIP for teachers and students for this year, which will be held once again the following year, this time in the Czech Republic.

For the ENPHE Forum, the group proposed a pre-conference course on the topic of Artificial Intelligence in Physiotherapy Education, which has been agreed by the ENPHE Board to be introduced.

Practice-Based Learning

This working group has been working on a revision of the assessment form for the international internships. They have incorporated the ZelCom Model into the existing form. This model is internationally known and can therefore be used by everyone. The evaluation form has been discussed and evaluated with the group members present at the Breda Seminar. With some minor adjustments, it has been drafted. The form is ready and will be placed on the ENPHE website soon.

There were also brainstorming sessions about possible topics for the group’s next focus area. For example, a possible topic suggested was on how teachers in different countries can bridge the gap between theory and practice. Another possibility is collaboration with the working group Interprofessional Learning.

Internationalisation

The Internationalisation group focused on its ongoing work towards the Global Competent Physiotherapist. Starting with the Competence Model, the group worked on defining the learning outcomes for Global Competencies, as well as defining their forms of assessment.

Planetary Health (Previously Environmental Physiotherapy) 

For the Seminar, the Planetary Health group completed their teaching prompts for the development of an e-book for teachers that they are aiming to publish. They also discussed emergencies and catastrophes in physiotherapy and promoted research projects and collaborations for members to maintain engagement with this topic.

The group recently held a BIP in Tromsø, and aspires to organise simultaneous classes across different institutions to discuss the topic of environmental physiotherapy and planetary health. With this in mind, the group has initiated a joint class project to be held online on the 8th of September, involving all the universities that participated in the working group sessions.

Research

The Research group began the planning and development of their survey for students in relation to evidence-based education during the Seminar. Their current and future developments include the following:

• Developed a survey for teachers on evidence based teaching - focusing on how teachers experience evidence-based teaching - which is being led by Zeltia Naia-Entonado. A pilot of this survey is planned for September, with a wider rollout by the end of the year.
• Continuous work on a systematic literature review that is being led by Adrien Pallot.
• Designing BIPs.
• Exploring new opportunities for collaboration on the More Life to Your Years project, which is being led by Anne Griet Brader.

Interprofessional Learning

During the Seminar, this group presented their results for the Inpro Project - in which higher education institutions and rehabilitation centers partnered and aimed to align interprofessional (IP) collaboration, to allow for a more successful and easy transfer from training in health and social professions to the work setting.

This group also discussed next steps and future expectations for its topic. The Interprofessional Learning group and the Practice-Based Learning group agreed to collaborate on their next joint project aimed at motivating students and lecturers in interprofessional learning by means of practice-based learning.

Pain Education

For the Pain Education group, the Seminar presented a space for their undergraduate pain education curriculum to further develop. During the Seminar, the group focused on two key activities: 

1. Creating a reference library to support the implementation of the European Pain Federation EFIC Core Pain Curriculum for Bachelor/Pre-registration Physiotherapy Programmes’ access to the pain curriculum.
2. Advancing the dissemination strategy for the curriculum.

The working sessions focused on workshops to clarify the competencies needed in this curriculum. The group also worked on creating a digital library for people to access resources connected to the pain education curriculum, and developed translation processes of the curriculum into additional European languages (currently the curriculum is translated into Danish, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, Lithuanian, Slovenian, and Dutch) to help make it more accessible and international.

The group also initiated a dissemination strategy for its implementation on a larger scale within institutions by developing slides to promote work of the ENPHE Pain Education Group that can be used at various conferences, as well as submitting a page for Physiopedia.

Facilitation of Learning

A new group of enthusiastic professionals came together to kick off the Facilitation of Learning Working Group. The group explored their shared understanding of what facilitation of learning means and exchanged good practices from a diverse background of contexts.

The content presented clearly highlighted that this working group serves as a strong connector across many of the themes discussed in other of ENPHE’s working groups. The group’s discussions also focused on how to future-proof the group, ensuring that it stays adaptive and forward-looking. A key message emerged from these interactions: it remains essential to continuously seek out and share innovative approaches to transfer knowledge and skills within our beautiful profession.

You can learn more about each working group and stay up to date with their contributions in our website's ENPHE Groups page.

Looking back…

…we are so happy to see that the ENPHE Seminar Edition of 2025 in Breda, The Netherlands, was another successful event, with colleagues coming together to collaborate, network and co-create. Such an event would not have been possible without the contributions and support of our colleagues at the host institution. Therefore, we would like to extend a special thank you to Jeroen Alessie, Eveline de Smidt, and Sarah Wennekes of Avans University of Applied Sciences, as well as all the other members of the organising committee, for their fundamental collaboration. Additionally, we are thankful to the keynote speaker for kindly sharing relevant insights for the physiotherapy education field, and the WG facilitators for leading crucial and innovative work within their groups. Lastly, we thank all the participants for joining and making this ENPHE event so memorable once again. 

We hope to see you all again at the ENPHE Forum 2025 in Differdange, Luxembourg! For more information about this, go to our Forum Event page.