Wise choices: Making physiotherapy care more valuable

There is a growing global awareness of the problem of low-value healthcare. Low-value healthcare broadly refers to the use of medical tests, diagnoses and treatments that provide patients with little-to-no benefit or cause harm.1 By providing unnecessary care to one group of patients, we divert finite health resources away from where they could be much better deployed. Elshaug et al recently identified at least 150 low-value healthcare practices currently listed on the Australian Medicare Benefits Schedule.1 While much of the literature about low-value care relates directly to medical tests and treatments, we believe that the problem is highly relevant to physiotherapy. In this article, we focus on one of the most common conditions seen by physiotherapists − low back pain. Low back pain causes the highest burden of any health condition worldwide and has considerable evidence to suggest that its management is permeated by low-value care.