Pinoy Blog Machine (Beta)

In order to work as a physiotherapist in New Zealand it is a legal requirement that you must first be registered with the Physiotherapy Board of New Zealand and hold an Annual Practising Certificate (APC).

The application fee is NZ $600.00 (non-refundable)

This is a legal process - aimed at protecting the public of New Zealand. Therefore, the Board will only grant registration to physiotherapists it considers safe and competent to practise.

There is no accreditation of overseas courses. Each application is individually assessed.

The information required is extensive and there is no guarantee of registration.

The onus is on the applicant to provide all the information required.

Errors and omissions will cause significant delays.

Eligibility for Registration
You must meet the following eligibility requirements before you can send an application. You will also be expected to answer the preliminary questions on page 27 of the application form before proceeding with your application.

What the Board is
In order to be registered as a physiotherapist in New Zealand you must meet the looking for following criteria:
• You must hold a physiotherapy qualification see below and, refer to section C.
• You must be able to demonstrate that you meet the New Zealand competencies set by the Physiotherapy Board including autonomous practice, clinical reasoning and evidence-based practice.

Qualifications
• Your physiotherapy qualification must be sufficiently similar in theory and practice to the physiotherapy curricula undertaken by students in New Zealand.
• You must have completed one thousand (1,000) hours of supervised clinical practice during your course of physiotherapy study.

Recency of practice
Applicants who have graduated three or more years prior to the date of application for registration are required:
• to have worked as a practising physiotherapist (as a clinician, manager, educator or researcher) during the three years immediately prior to application for registration; Or,
• to provide sufficient evidence of ongoing professional development during the three years immediately prior to application for registration; this evidence will be considered on a case by case basis.

English proficiency
Applicants whose first language is not English and/or whose course of Physiotherapy was not instructed and examined entirely in the English language must be able to provide evidence of their ability to comprehend and communicate effectively in English.

Legal and disciplinary history
You must provide details of your legal and disciplinary history. The Board will only register physiotherapists who can demonstrate they meet fitness for registration.

Mental and physical health
New Zealand law requires physiotherapists to be mentally and physically fit to practice within the profession.

You must supply all the supporting documents that the Board requires. Failure to do so will result in your application being returned to you. The Board may deduct an administration charge from your application fee.

You must ensure that all the documents marked as such by the Board are properly certified documents.

Please remember that at all times it is your responsibility to supply the information that the Board requires. It is therefore in your interests to make sure you get it right first time. The Board accepts no responsibility for delays resulting from omissions or errors on your part.

For more details on applying to be a registered physiotherapist in New Zealand, download the application form here. It is also helpful to read their FAQs here.

Haven't really read colleague JB Santos's post on U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama so I think I'm going to reserve my thoughts on the issue for the meantime. Just saw from Youtube however that Obama's March 18 speech is the most viewed video this week.

Here's the clip:



Here's a copy of his speech.

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Just want to add that there were some discussions regarding the use of comparison in "absolute" adjectives such as "perfect" or "unique". Here and here are just two of the many links regarding the issue. However, I agree on the discussion here that "more perfect" is correct. Also saw a post from Daily Writing Tips basically echoing similar points, but can't find the link. Sorry.

Finally. After more than a two-week hiatus and while taking my 15-minute break from transcribing an interview for a story for the April issue of the PJR Reports, I am back blogging again. I was planning to do a post something about Lent, but I got drained from trying to master singing the Pasyon overnight from our family's Pabasa activity. I guess knowing how to sing a song or two in the karaoke machine does not mean you can also be Pabasa's next singing sensation.

Anyway, Poynter Online--that informative resource tool for journalists--shares tips and suggestions from some of the best journalists in the United States on how to write compelling and outstanding stories.

By Bill Kirtz (more by author)
Professor, Northeastern University
Source: Poynter Online

Details. Details. Details. Top writers and editors last weekend called them the engine that drives every compelling story.

Their comments came at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston, March 14-16. Speakers offered tips on dramatizing investigations, doing narrative on deadline, identifying writing flaws and enhancing stories with multimedia.

Read more here.

Aside from talking about the importance of detail in writing wonderful narrative stories and using the right verbs, quote and attribution, Kirtz also discussed the pros and cons of multimedia storytelling. New York Times multimedia editor Andrew DeVigal, according to Kirtz, called new media as just a platform. "Story and story-telling hasn't changed," DeVigal said.

Talking about journalism in the age of new media, here's an article I wrote last year based on veteran journalist Sheila Coronel's presentation about new multimedia approaches in doing in-depth and investigative journalism.

Where three -or more- is not a crowd
A New Way of Reporting the News
by Hector Bryant L. Macale
Source: PJR Reports August 2007 issue

Faced by dwindling revenues and staff downsizing, should news organizations—the traditional gatekeepers of the news—be afraid of a world where blogs and citizen journalism have become increasingly important?

The future of journalism remains hotly debated among members of the press. Yet, news organizations may yet learn a thing or two from the new trends and techniques in which the news is being researched, reported, and presented.

“It’s a revolutionary moment in journalism. There is room for all kinds of experimentation now,” said journalist Sheila Coronel during her presentation on new trends in investigative reporting before a group of journalists last July 13. It was Coronel’s first visit to Manila since she assumed the post of inaugural director of The Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at the Columbia University in the United States last year.

The first and one of only three Hall of Famers of the Jaime V. Ongpin Awards for Excellence in Journalism, Coronel is a co-founder of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism where she served as executive director for 16 years.

“The business models that supported journalism for the longest time, especially print journalism—which are circu-lation and advertising that allowed newspapers to get revenues—are slowly crumbling and possibly collapsing,” Coronel said, adding, “Many newspapers are losing their circulation.”

Moving to new media

The changes not only affect the print medium but the broadcast medium as well. If the average newspaper reader in the US is 50 years old, Coronel said, the average viewer, say of global TV news giant CNN, is 60 years old.

“The audience for the so-called mainstream media is dimi-nishing,” she said, adding, “That is why the revenues that have sustained mainstream media operations for so long are slowly moving to new media.”

As consumers leave the traditional forms of media, advertisers follow them to the online medium where user-generated content is king. The power to act as information’s gatekeeper is devolving increasingly to the audience. No longer the monopoly of news managers and editors, new journalism involves greater participation among consumers in any aspect—research, writing, and distribution, according to Coronel.

“We don’t exactly know where things are going,” she said, adding that the source of news and information is currently shaped by both the press and the consumers every second.

The idea of who the journalist is is also increasingly being contested. The audience now is not just a consumer of news “but also a producer of stories.”

Read more here.