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PhysioBase was born in 1996 amidst an overcrowded apartment in London's West End.
At the time some 30 plus physiotherapists from the same Australian university were travelling around Europe desperately trying to stay in touch, both professionally and socially.
The order of the day back in the mid 90's seemed to be spent putting on the backpack following yet another twelve hour shift and rushing off to catch a flight to somewhere else on the continent. With all this running about, jumping between jobs and meeting new and numerous friends we found ourselves asking; ‘Why isn't there a physiotherapy website that provides a free email account, enables free access to dat abase search engines, posts jobs for permanent and locum positions, hosts a global physio directory and most importantly a site that hosts a forum where one could track down that Swedish therapist you met at the last pub you drank in in Chamonix or shared a conversation with on a flight to Greece.’
After all back in 1996 the web was just beginning. AOL and Hotmail were trying to gain market share and there seemed to be lots of sites out there targeting the medical profession but none particularly relevant to the needs of the global roaming physiotherapist.
So over a cappuccino and a croissant at the then named Seattle Coffee Company (now part of Starbucks) a bunch of us got together to map out a site that was to be ‘built by physios for physios’.
Our philosophy was simple – we aimed to cater for the needs of all physiotherapists, using the internet as a medium to enhance interaction within the profession on a global scale. Further to that we set a goal of improving the quality of care given by the physiotherapy community, raise public awareness of our profession as leading providers of healthcare, and we would endeavour to assist developing nations improve the provision of their developing physiotherapy services.
We also hoped to promote freedom of speech in relation to all editorial, discussion and content posted to the site.
A team of eight staff based out of our Sydney and London offices are dedicated to continually maintaining the site to ensure it is crammed with up to the minute news and content aimed at servicing your needs. Since our online launch in late 1999 we have now grown to an online community of over 34,000 physiotherapists representing membership from 180 countries.
We welcome all your comments and suggestions as we strive to deliver what we hope will remain the leading community site for physiotherapy profession.
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