Here, other initiatives, such as www.physiotherapyexercises.com, are useful. This website, which is appraised in detail in this issue of the journal, allows free online access to definitions of a wide array of exercises used in rehabilitation. Each exercise is described using text, diagrams, and photographs, in some cases supplemented

by video. It therefore provides comprehensive definitions of over 900 exercises. Physiotherapists wishing to describe an exercise can refer to the site knowing that the exercise they name will not be misinterpreted. Other find more aspects (such as resistance, repetitions, and any modifications) still need to be defined, but at least the basic description can be unambiguously agreed upon by reference to the site. Other sites do much to standardise even more complex interventions, such as pulmonary rehabilitation on the Australian Lung Foundation’s Pulmonary Rehabilitation Toolkit website. Physiotherapists should consider using and supporting initiatives such as those described above. Increasing standardisation of the terms we use clinically and in research has the potential to improve communication within the profession. “
“Interest in the therapeutic alliance between clinician and patient began in the fields of medical care (Stewart 1995) and psychotherapy (Hovarth and Symonds 1991, Martin et al MAPK inhibitor 2000). The therapeutic alliance, also referred to in the literature as the working

alliance, therapeutic bond, or helping alliance, is a general construct that usually includes in its theoretical definition the collaborative nature, the affective bond, and the goal and task agreement between patients

and clinicians (Martin et al 2000). Other constructs, such as trust (Hall et al 2002) 17-DMAG (Alvespimycin) HCl and empathy (Mercer et al 2004), may overlap with this definition and are also used to assess the quality of the alliance. More recently, this concept has been considered in the field of physical rehabilitation, including physiotherapy settings (Hall et al 2010). The evidence has shown that a good therapeutic alliance can positively influence treatment outcomes such as improvement in symptoms and health status and satisfaction with care (Hall et al 2010). A good example comes from musculoskeletal rehabilitation. Patients undergoing physiotherapy for chronic low back pain with a strong therapeutic alliance showed an increase as high as four points on a 0–10 scale of global perceived effect compared to those with a weak therapeutic alliance (Ferreira et al 2009). In the field of physiotherapy, the nature of most interventions is usually long-term. Hence, patients’ adherence to longterm treatment regimens is vital to achieve effective clinical practice (WHO 2003). More broadly, it has been recognised that lack of adherence to long-term therapies results in poor clinical outcomes and unnecessarily high costs of health care (WHO 2003).