For Dr. Catherine Bilyeu, taking on the role of head of the physical therapy department at the College of Rehabilitation Sciences has been a true homecoming.
Winnipeg-born Bilyeu graduated from the University of Manitoba’s physical therapy (PT) program in 1994 and moved to Colorado shortly after, spending over 20 years working clinically before joining the University of Colorado PT faculty full time in 2016.
There, she was an assistant professor and associate director of clinical education. She also led numerous faculty development initiatives, including a faculty residency program that provides mentored experiential learning opportunities to licensed physical therapists who were new to the faculty and transitioning into academic roles.
In addition to her UM degree, Bilyeu has a doctorate in physical therapy and PhD in health sciences from the University of South Dakota.
We recently spoke with Bilyeu about her vision for the PT department.
I was an athlete all through high school and university, which is sort of a common starting point for this profession. I have a brother who’s a physician, so I heavily explored medicine and some other health professions, but ultimately decided PT offered flexibility in terms of the settings you work in and the patient populations with whom you work. I was also drawn to a profession that supports patients who are resuming or redefining their ability to participate richly in all aspects of their lives.
When I graduated from UM, there were some opportunities in the United States based on demand at the time in the profession. It felt like an adventure to move with a friend from the program to Colorado, where we began our careers. I met my husband and then spent most of my clinical career there.
I had a fairly long clinical career with Kaiser Permanente, a wonderful non-profit health system. They covered all aspects of health care – physicians, nurses, vision care, labs, physical therapy, occupational therapy and more, providing holistic patient care. It was a very wellness-focused institution that really aligned with my vision and values for providing health care. Like many clinicians, I made a gradual transition into an academic position after doing a lot of clinical teaching. This background provided the foundation for my academic roles and research, which focus on supporting the continuum of PT educators and students from classroom to clinic.
There was this deep draw to come back to family and to the land and environment that I was raised on, and I was fortunate enough to be able to expose my kids to it as well, visiting frequently during their formative years, connecting with family and lake country areas. And there really was this strange comfort in making the leap into this position, and coming back to support a program that still has some familiar components, values and approaches to education that I remember. I can now give back to the program that shaped me as a physiotherapist.
The faculty here was already starting to work on some things that I really love focusing on, like program expansion and curricular change, with the clear purpose of enhancing the diversity of the students and the faculty so we can better meet the needs of our future patients and students respectively. There were already some interesting and impactful initiatives getting started – such as enhancing Indigenous ways of thinking and learning in the curriculum – and it’s exciting to consider how I can be a part of guiding the program forward into these new areas.
There is a body of literature that describes education as the foundation of a profession, and physical therapy, I think, is at this turning point where it needs to better figure out how to meet the needs of our communities and society. I think it takes two things to transform PT education for the future. We need to continue to advance efforts in recruiting, developing and retaining individuals in the profession who represent the people they serve, which includes both faculty and students. We also need to shift to an organic curriculum that can allow graduates to enter the workforce as adaptive experts, so they can function successfully within ever-changing health systems and environments.
To learn more about UM's physical therapy program, visit:
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