Policy research for physiotherapy in Belgium and South Africa: A scoping review

Background
The legislative structure of South Africa is comparable to the structure in Belgium. There is a national government in both countries responsible for overarching nationwide legislation. Despite these changes that align the two regions in Belgium to the South African legislative environment, there are differences. The legislative structure for physiotherapy policy development in Belgium appears to be more challenging to physiotherapists when proposing adaptations.

Aims
This review aimed to identify from the literature policy research and policy related to physiotherapy (concerning actors, content processes, and context) in Belgium and South Africa.

Material and methods
The scoping review followed a five-step search strategy, namely: to identify the research question and relevant studies, to select documents for the study, to chart the data, to collate, summarise, and to report the results.

Results
A review of the titles and abstracts of the 84 articles identified from the databases Scopus, PubMed and Web of Science included three and excluded 81 articles. Subsequently, 99 referenced articles were identified from the initial articles. After removing duplicates and excluding articles not meeting inclusion criteria, no additional articles were included in the analysis. The selected articles for both countries addressed physiotherapy policy. For Belgium, the emphasis is on the limited professional autonomy, and the scope of practice seems to be not protected. For South Africa, the article addressed the inadequate provincial policy development.

Conclusions
The literature review provided insight and confirmed the revealed paucity of studies on policy research in physiotherapy. Only three articles were found underpinning policy elements related to physiotherapists as stakeholders. Furthermore, we found no articles that addressed the physiotherapy policy development process in Belgium or South Africa.