ABSTRACT

Introduction: Physiotherapy is an independent health profession today, and physiotherapists are distinguished by three professional roles: educators, clinicians and researchers, which require the development of certain competencies.

Aim: To investigate the attitudes of physiotherapists, physiotherapists, and lecturers about the importance of developing formal and informal education in physiotherapy.

Materials and methods: Electronic search of literature in bibliographic databases (Croatian Scientific Bibliography, PubMed, Cohrane Library, Physiotherapy) with the key words "Physiotherapy", "Education", "Competences".

Results: By eliminating the sources according to the selected criteria, by the filtering process, 19 final sources were obtained that were suitable for analyzing and reviewing the literature on the importance of formal and non-formal education in physiotherapy.

Conclusion: Evidence-based practice is the most important element of modern physiotherapy, and the best evidence is considered randomized controlled research and systematic reviews of literature that are still present in a very small number that are directly related to the topic of building key competencies with regard to the academic level of education of health professionals and problems that arise in translating new scientific and empirical knowledge into everyday practice.

Key words: physiotherapy, education, competencies