Listening to Patients’ Voices: What Can We Learn?

I t is a wonderful honour to have been selected as the Canadian Physiotherapy Association’s Enid Graham Memorial Lecturer for 2006. I would like to thank Dr. Marilyn MacKay-Lyons for spearheading and coordinating this nomination, as well as those of you who wrote letters on my behalf. Because I still feel like a relatively ‘‘new’’ Canadian, having emigrated here in 1990 and become a citizen in 1996, to be honoured as such by my Canadian physiotherapist peers is especially meaningful for me. Why have I chosen to talk about patient voices in this lecture? Many would have assumed that I would have chosen to wax eloquently on clinical research, knowledge translation or perhaps our journal, Physiotherapy Canada. Patients, clients or consumers are at the very heart of our profession and the reason that most of us entered physiotherapy in the first place: because we cared and we wanted to help others. I frequently tell my physical therapy (PT) students that the most important things that I have learned in my career are lessons that have come from patients and their families. Three goals will form the outline for this lecture: (1) to define the term patient versus other similar terms; (2) to discuss the importance of listening to the patient’s voice in our various roles as clinicians, researchers, educators and students and (3) to imbed my own personal stories and experiences with patients, as well as what the research literature has to tell us about the importance of incorporating the patient’s voice into practice, research and education. DEFINITIONS OF A PATIENT AND OTHER SIMILAR TERMS