Leadership and physiotherapy: A scoping review.

Questions: The challenges faced by healthcare organizations require effective leaders. Leadership has been extensively studied in medicine and nursing, but it is limited in physiotherapy. The objective of this study is to know and analyze the published research on the characteristics of leadership in physiotherapy.
Design: A scoping review was conducted following the PRISMA extension guidelines. MEDLINE, The Cochrane Library, PEDro, Embase, CINAHL, Web Of Science and Scopus databases were reviewed between 01/01/2000 and 30/06/2022.All quantitative studies addressing the characteristics of leadership in physiotherapy were selected. Data extraction was performed using a table including author, year of publication, country of origin, title, objective, measurement instrument, sample and main findings.
Data Synthesis: The results obtained were framed within the framework for the study of leadership designed by Bolman and Deal.
Results: Eight studies were selected. The characteristics most valued or used by physiotherapists are communication, desire for continuous learning and improvement, credibility and professionalism.
Conclusion: Leadership is very important for physiotherapists, and for physiotherapy, as profession they consider it very important to have vision and to lead change. Communication skills are the most highly regarded characteristic.
Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)