The Department of Physical Therapy achieved the ability to provide a doctor of physical therapy degree after Sacramento State helped change a California law prohibiting it from doing so.

“The reason we have a doctorate program is the accrediting agency from the American Physical Therapy Association has said by 2015 all programs that will attain accreditation have to be at the doctorate level,” said Michael McKeough, professor of physical therapy.

McKeough said the association reasoned the body of knowledge required to practice physical therapy was so large it warranted many years of study, which a doctoral degree would fulfill.

The decision to change from a master’s program to a doctorate program at Sac State had serious consequences if the program was not able to change.

“Last year we were faced with an issue of convert from a master program to a doctoral program or close the doors,” McKeough said. “In order to do that, we had to change the law because the law said that only the UC systems offer doctorates and the CSU systems offer bachelors and masters.”

The closing of the program would not only impact students, but the industry of physical therapy in California.

“Graduates from the CSU represented about 25 percent of the physical therapists that graduated from programs across the state of California,” said Susan McGinty, director and chair of physical therapy.

McKeough said the audiology program had been affected in the same way, but was unable to change the law, and it was cut from Sac State four years ago.

The law was designed to organize structure in California, which has the largest university system in the country.

The community colleges were to be aligned with associate degrees, CSUs with bachelor’s and master’s and UCs with doctorates.

McKeough was sorry to see that California was one of the very last states to move to the doctoral level within the physical therapy major in this country.

McGinty said the California Legislature did not like a national accrediting body telling the state what to do.

McGinty said once the American Physical Therapy Association mandated physical therapy programs had to have a doctorate program or shut their doors, the legislative branch in California stopped dragging its feet.

Nine programs out of the 212 physical therapy programs in the country did not have the legislative authority to offer a doctorate program including Sac State.

This has been a long up-hill battle for McGinty and McKeough to gain a doctorate program for Sac State.

In 2004, McGinty showed up to testify one morning at the legislature in which she was informed physical therapy was no longer on the bill due to the rejection by the legislators.

It eventually passed the legislature in 2010, but that was not the end of it.

“Once it got out of the legislature there was still no guarantee that the governor would sign it,” McGinty said. “His legislative analyst initially recommended that he not sign it.”

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger eventually signed it after an unpleasant meeting with McGinty and other advocates of the physical therapy program.

Sac State would not be the only CSU affected if the law was not changed. San Diego, Long Beach, Northridge and Fresno would have also been affected.

Out of all the CSUs, Sac State has achieved this doctorate program in physical therapy first.

Changing the law was just the beginning of Sac State’s journey for a physical therapy doctoral program at Sac State in which the program had to pass through a number of organizations to approve a whole new curriculum.

The programs curriculum had to go through the doctoral accreditation programs within Sac State in which there had to be Senate approval and CSU’s central administration had to approve the curriculum along with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

Western Association of Schools and Colleges is the organization which accredits Sac State along with other universities.

“The master program is two and a half years and the doctorate program three and a half years. The class that came in this year will be the last master’s class,” McKeough said. “The class that comes in next year will be the first doctoral class. Then, there will be no more master’s.”

The doctorate program will be hands-on because of the mock clinics set up by McKeough.

“We call it a mock clinic since the students are not really therapists,” McKeough said. “The students learn to work with people who have movement problems due to neurologic damage. For example, when I teach the class on treating stroke patients each of the students gets their own stroke patient to work on in lab.”

McKeough said the advantage here at Sac State is students get to work with people who have had neurological damage.

“The students work with the real thing,” McKeough said. “Learn real handling skills rather than their partner pretending they have had a stroke.”

The future plans are to move the physical therapy program over to Folsom Hall, which the nursing program has already done with their transition on campus. However, the physical therapy program stills needs to raise enough funds to cover the renovation of Folsom Hall.

“They are trying to raise those funds privately,” McGinty said. “In this downturn, those resources are not so easily forthcoming.”

McGinty said with physical therapy sharing the labs with kinesiology in their current building of Solano Hall has made scheduling difficult.

This competitive physical therapy doctorate program is very popular with the submission of more than 500 applications for 32 spots.

A 3.0 grade point average is the minimum to apply in which the applicant has to have more than 100 hours of time in at least two different practice settings like an acute care hospital.

The applicants are required to have three letters of recommendation in which two have to be from a physical therapist who has directly supervised them. Second language skills are highly prized with the applicant.

The top 80 students will come in for an interview by a team of three faculty members from the department and two clinicians from the community. Those chosen will have a wide spectrum of health care jobs available to them.

“There is a role for physical therapy from the neonatal ICU working with preemie babies to end of life care as members of a hospice team,” McGinty said. “Physical therapy is not limited to sports therapy.”

McGinty wants these physical therapy students to be generalists so they can be prepared in various physical therapy situations.

“I always say we get the best and brightest,” McGinty said. “You could not ask for anything more as a faculty.”

Emily Mintz, physical therapy masters’ student, said she is excited for the faculty, department and future students with the doctoral announcement.

Mintz has been impressed with this program where she has seen some of the graduates to be the best physical therapy professionals in the area and finds value in the mock clinics and hands-on instruction.

She said she was somewhat scared coming from Chico State to Sac State because she heard this school was a commuter school in which she felt it would be hard to find a network.

“But this program has proven those stereotypes wrong,” Mintz said. “The faculty are so caring and really take an interest in your success not just in the classroom, but outside in the real world as well. The students in this program are so close and I think that every person has made lifelong friends from attending school here.”

Mintz became a physical therapy major because of a car accident with her father where his ankle was crushed.

“Without physical therapy, I don’t think he would have been able to become the dad that I remember and be as active as I know he wanted to be,” said Mintz. “I attribute his ability of teaching me how to ride a bike while running behind me or showing me how to run hurdles in high school to the hard work of physical therapists.”

Masters’ students such as Mintz can attain their doctorate through a transitional doctorate if they choose to go for it, which McGinty strongly suggests to keep them current and competitive.

Colin McAteer can be reached at [email protected]