As one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s newest specialists, Stuart Horton is still reflecting on the scope and the work it took to achieve it.
“There’s a real clarity in my mind now about how I’m doing things and why I’m doing things. Not that there wasn’t before, but it just feels like I’ve cleaned the window of the lens that I look through.”
For Stuart, who is now approaching 35 years in practice, the standout part of the application was writing the case studies.
“The selection of the patients for your clinical writing for the case studies is a really important thing. I actually ended up writing three case studies. You only have to write two, but I wrote three because I didn’t like the second one. So I binned it and started again, which was kind of frustrating because it takes time; a lot of time.
“That’s an example of how important I think that the case studies are because they make you examine how you think, how you approach patients and the reasoning behind your clinical decisions.
“Drilling down into my clinical reasoning at a really deep level I learned a lot. The two case studies I chose were things that I haven’t really thought about before in a whole lot of detail. So writing them up to that next level was huge learning for me.”
Stuart says that attaining Specialist registration has been the “icing on the cake” of his career which started as a student at Otago, moved to rotational hospital work as a new graduate and then a two‐year stint in Michigan, USA, as a physical therapist.
Returning to Dunedin from the US he took up his first role in private practice while completing postgraduate studies, before taking up a clinical teaching role at the School of Physiotherapy where he remained for 23 years.
“During that tenure, around the early 2000s I got to meet Robin McKenzie personally as the McKenzie Institute wanted to bring their Diploma program to Otago. So I was offered the opportunity to go to the States to train and complete the Diploma program. I then came back and set up the programme at Otago where we took on international students and I was the Diploma tutor for three years. It was a really amazing experience.”
Like many practitioners who take on the specialist scope application, Stuart was given encouragement by an established Specialist, in this case Dr Mark Laslett, who provided Stuart with support and mentoring.
“I went to a course run by the McKenzie Institute New Zealand in Wellington. It was a weekend course, and Mark was presenting on his work on the lumbar spine, his research, and his teachings. I’d known Mark over the years and so we got talking and he said, ‘Stuart, you should seriously think about being a specialist because you’ve got all of the background credentials and your experience’ and he offered to support me through it.
“At the time I wasn’t really thinking about it, but then over the next few months I talked to a couple of other people who also said the same thing to me. I thought that was a good sign, so I contacted Mark again and said, Yep, let’s do it. So I have had that privilege of his mentorship over the last eighteen months.
“I’m sure there’ll be colleagues out there today thinking about being a specialist and some of them have already started the process of working towards it; some of them will just be working though whether they really want to commit to it. To them, the best advice I can give is to seek out someone that you can talk to about that. Someone who’s been there, done that, to give you some advice and guidance about what specialist practice looks like.”
So where to now?
“I see my role in Dunedin as working collaboratively with the local physiotherapy community, offering support with more complex spinal patients where a specialist perspective may be helpful. I’d like to work alongside colleagues to help clarify diagnoses, explore management options and determine when further investigation or referral might be appropriate.
“I’ve also benefited enormously from the support and guidance of others throughout my own journey, and I’d really like to pay that forward by supporting colleagues who are considering specialist registration themselves.”
