How physiotherapy education is being strengthened in Ukraine, and what our team learned along the way

A new paper published in BMC Medical Education describes how four Ukrainian universities reformed their physical therapy programmes during wartime, using a structured review tool developed by the Physiopedia team. The findings offer practical lessons not just for Ukraine, but for any setting where rehabilitation education is under pressure.

Ukraine’s rehabilitation workforce has faced enormous strain since the full-scale invasion began. Rising levels of war-related trauma, disability and chronic disease have intensified demand for skilled physiotherapists at precisely the moment when educational continuity has been hardest to maintain. Against this backdrop, four universities (spanning Kyiv, Lviv and Zaporizhzhia) embarked on a 2-year structured review of their physical therapy programmes using the Academic Program Reflection Tool (APRT), one of the core tools within Physiopedia’s International Rehabilitation Education and Training Toolkit (IRETT).

The APRT guided institutions through reflection across seven domains: programme philosophy, learning outcomes, curriculum, student admission and progression, faculty, resources and programme integrity. What emerged was a clearer picture of both strengths and gaps. Curriculum mapping against national and international standards revealed areas needing development, including wound care and integumentary management relevant to conflict-related injuries, global health perspectives and preparation for continuing professional development. Institutions also identified heavy reliance on lecture-based teaching, inconsistency in clinical supervision and assessment, and significant faculty shortages. These are challenges that will be familiar to physiotherapy educators in many parts of the world, and which are intensified considerably by wartime conditions.

One of the more striking findings was that institutional confidence in some areas actually decreased during the process. Rather than indicating regression, this reflected something valuable: structured reflection was surfacing problems that had previously gone unrecognised. Programmes left the process with clearer priorities, revised learning outcomes, improved assessment frameworks and formal quality improvement plans, and crucially, with stronger local ownership of reform. Faculty who participated went on to take mentorship roles supporting occupational therapy programmes at their own institutions, suggesting the capacity built extends well beyond the original scope of the project.

Physiopedia’s support for Ukrainian physiotherapy education extends beyond this research. A total of 391 of our online courses (and counting!) are now available in Ukrainian, supporting nearly 10,000 learners across the country to access evidence-based clinical education in their own language. This sits alongside the broader work of IRETT, which has now been piloted across Burma, Pakistan, Uganda and Ukraine and provides free, practical tools for rehabilitation workforce strengthening in any context. You can explore the full toolkit at irett.physio-pedia.com.

Strengthening rehabilitation education in low-resource and conflict-affected settings is slow, complex work, but this paper shows it is entirely possible, and that the lessons learned are transferable well beyond Ukraine. Read the full open-access paper for more details and if you have experience in rehabilitation education in challenging settings that you think could inform Physiopedia’s work, we would love to hear from you.