A buyer's market for physiotherapists

The large NHS hospitals were the automatic choice of many newly qualified physiotherapists when they were considering their first job. It seemed the obvious choice with the variety of experience, supervision systems, peer support and on-site expertise.

A small town hospital in East Devon (South West England, UK) recently advertised for a junior physiotherapist. Nobody goes there without a good reason, it's just not on anyone's travel plan. The breadth of experience is restricted, the opportunities relatively few. Did they have any applicants?

You bet! They had over two hundred!

Now some of those can be explained by the fact that India has a surplus of physiotherapists at the moment, with an M.Sc. necessary for them to progress. Many apply to the UK and are now finding they have little chance of success with the large numbers of unemployed UK applicants.

Out-of-work physiotherapists have had to make many hard decisions to go forward somehow. Some work in non-health jobs, others have taken volunteer posts or posts which are usually taken by unqualified people.

One upshot of this is that physiotherapists have been forced to think more flexibly about where they might get their first few years experience. We in the large acute hospitals are unable to magic up a huge number of new posts, although we have done our bit to be creative.

Physiotherapists are now considering getting their first jobs in community posts or in small provincial hospitals. That should be good for the units concerned as it was always hard to attract applicants to what may have been seen as less glamorous areas of work.

This market is putting a huge pressure on the locum agencies, who are finding the number of posts available has been cut dramatically. We are in an intense buyer's market for the moment. As the manager of a department it is good as we get people queueing up to come and work for us and can take our pick of good candidates.

It is hard for those caught up in the process however. Many are finding they cannot be so casual about their choices anymore. Can you go travelling for a year and risk coming back when the next year's cohort is qualifying and looking for jobs?

The quality of applications is one of my little obsessions. Some are so bad I can't think they really want a job. You need to be good even to get considered at the moment, let alone appointed. The market is working it's cold magic.