Stave Off - One Private Owners attempt to Navigate the Health and Wellness Space

Course Overview

With Canada’s aging population and rising rates of chronic disease, healthcare is shifting toward preventative care and lifestyle-focused interventions. Physiotherapists are uniquely positioned to support health and wellness with non-pharmacological, conservative approaches — yet integrating these services into private practice remains unclear for many clinicians. 

This course explores real-world strategies, ethical considerations, and practical action steps for physiotherapists who want to expand into health, wellness, and prevention services within the private sector. 

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

• Implement health and wellness initiatives into your private physiotherapy practice
• Recognize red & yellow flags and ethical boundaries in wellness-oriented services
• Evaluate key considerations for working with gym owners or owning a health-focused space

Audience

This course is ideal for:

• Private-practice physiotherapists & clinicians
• Clinic owners and managers
• Professionals interested in adding wellness and prevention services to traditional treatment offerings 

Evidence Supporting Physiotherapy-Led Health Promotion

Global and national research increasingly supports a shift in healthcare away from reactive, disease-focused models and toward preventative, health-promoting approaches. The World Health Organization’s World Report on Ageing and Health (2015) explicitly calls for this paradigm shift, emphasizing prevention, functional ability, and long-term wellness rather than episodic care.

Physiotherapists are well positioned to lead this transition. Scoping reviews have demonstrated the effectiveness of health promotion and tertiary prevention strategies, particularly among older adults (Duplaga et al., 2016), as well as the role of physiotherapists in general physical activity promotion across populations (Lowe et al., 2016). Additional research has examined how often physiotherapists engage in conversations around healthy lifestyle behaviors, along with the barriers and facilitators influencing these discussions in clinical practice (Healey et al., 2012).

In the United States, counselling patients on health behaviors is recognized as being within the scope of physiotherapy practice (Fruth et al., 1998), and patients themselves report that physiotherapists should be addressing physical activity and weight management as part of care (Black et al., 2016).

In Canada, this professional responsibility is similarly acknowledged. STAVE OFF Physiotherapy & Exercise Facility, established in 2015, was created in response to this growing body of evidence. As a physiotherapy–gym hybrid model, STAVE OFF aims to bridge the gap between what research tells us about health promotion in physiotherapy and the real-world considerations of private practice, including ethical scope, business models, and marketing within the prevention and wellness space.

This course offers a practical case study of how these principles can be implemented thoughtfully, responsibly, and sustainably in private physiotherapy practice.