Physiotherapists’ Perceptions of Disability Awareness in KwaZulu-Natal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Disability awareness is essential for rehabilitation professionals, such as physiotherapists, to provide an understanding of disability and to influence environmental and attitudinal societal barriers. There is a paucity of literature on the perceptions of physiotherapists about disability awareness in the South African context. OBJECTIVES: To explore the perceptions of physiotherapists on disability awareness in order to influence the rehabilitative care offered to people with disability. METHOD: This study adopted an explorative, descriptive qualitative design. Two focus group discussions were conducted with public healthcare physiotherapists employed at urban and rural facilities. Transcribed data were analysed using conventional content thematic analysis. There were five participants in each group: two males and eight females, with nine participants having worked for more than six years. RESULTS: The discussions revealed five major themes: consequences of a dearth of knowledge; personal influence; facilitators of disability awareness; barriers to disability awareness; and recommendations. CONCLUSION: Access to healthcare is hindered by a lack of understanding, and the subsequent behaviour, including the stigmatisation of people with disabilities. The study highlighted that poor knowledge of disability and lack of cultural sensitivity among physiotherapists working among communities strongly motivated by cultural beliefs, may influence the rehabilitation of people living with disability. It was concluded that self-reflection, coupled with deeper community engagement and continuing professional development, would enhance physiotherapy practice and disability awareness in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".