
Interdisciplinary learning in public health for physiotherapy and occupational therapy students
In Norway, the Bachelor program in physiotherapy is a three-year full-time program comprising 180 ECTS. At the UiT The Arctic University of Norway, in 2021, we had an opportunity to redesign our 2nd-semester introductory module in public health (effectively 5 ECTS at the time, though currently being expanded to 10 ECTS), as we have described here. A year later, the opportunity presented itself to also redesign our 5th-semester advanced public health module (10 ECTS) as a way to build on the foundation we had now created in the first year and deepen our students’ learning about sustainable health. The module was redesigned in increasingly close collaboration with colleagues from the UiT Bachelor program in occupational therapy such that we would teach together as a team and the students would learn and work together as a large, interdisciplinary group.
Overview of the module
The module has now run for the fourth time and we have refined various details with each iteration. The current version of the module is organised across seven weeks that are described here consecutively:
Week 1: During the first week, students are given different sets of literature concerning key terms, concepts, and principles of public health, including sustainability, co-creation, SDoH, health in/equity, and more. In their interdisciplinary groups, they then have a few days to read through the literature and prepare presentations to each other and the teachers (somewhat flipped classroom inspired). This week lays the theoretical foundation for the weeks to follow.
Week 2: The second week follows the same structure as the first week; however, this time, students work with case studies that exemplify the terms, concepts, and principles they learned during the week before in practice. This helps students gain a sense of many different ways that public/planetary health practice might look and how it strives to put its principles into practice.
Week 3: Week three deepens the sense of hands-on application of public health as our students spend the week observing and supporting various voluntary and third-sector organisations in Tromsø. These include anything from community gardens and beach clean-up organisations, to football teams for the homeless, inclusivity activities for migrant youth, and many others. As before, the week is also concluded by presentations on their experiences from the field that, again, require students to make the theory-to-practice translation explicit as it pertains to their respective placement.
Week 4: During this week, we turn our focus back to theory but, this time, focus on place and local communities and environments as another field for public health practice that equally has a very hands-on, concrete feel to it. As in the first week, students get literature on key concepts, terms, and principles that they analyse in their interdisciplinary groups and present to each other at the end of the week.
Week 5: The fifth week presents another opportunity to put theory into practice as we send them out into town to assess different neighbourhoods using the excellent Place Standard Tool designed by NHS Scotland. The PST provides a simple framework to structure conversations about place, getting our students to think about the physical, social, health, and environmental aspects of the spaces and places they are tasked to look at. Assessments are presented to each other and discussed with the larger student group at the end of the week.


Filip Maric (PhD)
PT, EPA Founder
Filip Maric is Associate professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and founder of the Environmental Physiotherapy Association. He is interested in the outer rims of healthcare and physiotherapy, practical philosophy, ethics, #EnviroPT, planetary health and sea kayaking.

Ingerid Blom Østlund (MSc)
Lecturer, UiT Bachelor program in Occupational Therapy
Ingerid is an occupational therapist with a Master in public health from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Her Master research focussed on …
Week 6 and 7: The beginning of week six is a transition to students working on their exam task during which we provide ample time for questions around the exam task and academic writing support. The task consists of writing a kind of research report (in preparation for their Bachelor thesis that they slowly begin working on soon after) where the students have to write a) an introduction about public health in general, then b) identify 2-3 social or ecological ‘community needs’ that they have come across during their first placements, c) assess these against one of the places they evaluated during their second placement, that is, describe how well or poorly these are met in the place in question, and d) discuss a possible intervention that could help improve those needs in the given place.
Evaluation
On the whole, students are very happy with this module though they also feel challenged by it in different ways. To date, public health, sustainability and macro-level thinking are still relatively foreign for most physiotherapy and occupational therapy students and it takes quite some time to see how all of this relates to the rather strong preconceptions they have of their professions as being focused on individuals and micro-level interventions in this sense. The practical focus of our module, however, gradually breaks down these barriers and helps students see that they could indeed have a role in and contribute to public/sustainable health at higher-up levels and so contribute to innovation in our professions.
Students and teachers alike enjoy the interdisciplinary aspect of the module and the genuinely collaborative spirit that arises throughout these weeks.
Reflections on the way forward
The work with our two public health modules has been a central element of our efforts to bring environmental, sustainability and planetary health education into the UiT Bachelor in physiotherapy in line with our commitment to the EPT Agenda. In addition to these, we have also worked to include the ICF model and, with it, environmental factors into the more individually oriented clinical education subjects and practice, as another key ingredient to make the importance of the social and ecological environment more present to our students. Another step we are now taking aim at is to redesign our occupational health module as an example of physiotherapy at the meso level (that is, the individual in their environment) and so as a link that will help students more easily think and practice across different levels of professional engagement. We have published some of our thoughts in a commentary and an interview in the Norwegian physiotherapy journal.
Ta kontakt / Get in touch
🇳🇴 Vi vil gjerne høre fra deg og fortsette samtalen om vår undervisning. Hvis du har noen tilbakemeldinger, spørsmål eller ideer som du ønsker å dele med oss, kan du kontakte Filip Maric (PhD) via e-post eller bruke kommentarsskjemaet nedenfor.
🇬🇧 We would love to hear from you and continue the conversation about our teaching initiative. If you have any feedback, questions or ideas that you would like to share with us, please contact Filip Maric (PhD) via email or use the comment form below.
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