Professional Practice: Blog 7

Professional Practice: Blog 7

By Simon Marks

What does it mean to be a massage therapist and a multi-disciplinary healthcare provider?

Multi-disciplinary healthcare is something that is starting to be considered more frequently in all areas of healthcare. Massage is one of these areas and in order for us to provide the best treatment for clients. To do this we need to work with and understand other healthcare providers so that referrals and advice can be exchanged. Because we are is still trying to build the professional image of the massage industry both in the public eye and healthcare community, this is even more important for us to do in order to build trust and respect for our scope of treatment. I will talk about these issues and ways in which we can build this multi-disciplinary way of treatment.

Multi-disciplinary practice is something that is needed in healthcare because no one therapist can cater for all the needs of a client. Healthcare professionals need to understand their scope of practice and that of other healthcare providers. This can be done by numerous methods one being as simple as reading over the scope of practice documents provided by there representative department. Another which is more effective and beneficial to becoming a multi- disciplinary healthcare provider is to work with and build relationships with other healthcare areas. This allows you to work together to provide the best outcome for an individual, and hopefully help to gain respect for massage therapists. If we do this then hopefully networking will become more common place between massage and other healthcare providers. At the moment this doesn’t happen enough, and a reason for this is that medical and therapeutic sides of massage in NZ are not very well known. For this reason we need to be proactive in pushing toward becoming more multi-disciplinary.

Multi-disciplinary structure would be the best way to run public healthcare but there are things that prevent or make it difficult to do. One is the fact that each area of the healthcare system, not only has different techniques and procedures, but they can think of health of the body and mind etc in a different way too. This means that not only do different areas have to understand the techniques, but they need to understand the reasons they work. They may never have been taught or thought in this way, so it is understandable that they would have reservations referring on in this situation. Especially if they have ideas on the problem although not really being in there scope of practice. The multi-disciplinary approach would be to refer to another healthcare provider that would be better suited to the task.

All areas of healthcare need to be open towards understanding others areas of the healthcare system and be aware of there strengths and weaknesses for it to work. But we as massage therapist need to be proactive and prove our skills and areas of expertise to the other healthcare professions. I don’t think are aware of our skills and for this reason we haven’t yet gained their overall respect as healthcare providers. We can do this by keeping in touch with people up the chain of any mishaps, improvements or conditions of our clients to build trust and relations, knowing what we are good at and marketing to these groups, and creating a consensus on ideas by doing and presenting research to prove our ideas and theories. Doing this will help to bring us closer to the level of other healthcare providers.

Although there is a consensus that a multi-disciplinary healthcare system would be the most beneficial and effective structure for the public health system to run. There are problems that arise when it comes to understandings in techniques and angles of treatment between the different areas of the healthcare system. It would be the most beneficial for us as massage therapists, because it would help us find our place and gain respect as healthcare providers. For this reason I think we should be the proactive ones in building relationships towards the other established healthcare providers.