Guest Editorial: Acquiring Soft Skills for Physiotherapy and Its Professional Competencies Evaluation Srilatha Girish & Sampath Kumar Amaravadi* Assistant Professor, Department of Physiotherapy, College of Health Sciences, Gulf Medical University, Ajman, United Arab Emirates *Address all correspondence to: Sampath Kumar Amaravadi, MPT, PhD, Department of Physiotherapy, College of Health Sciences, Gulf Medical University, Ajman, United Arab Emirates; Tel.: +971543204752; Fax: +971-6-7431333, E-mail: dr.sampath@gmu.ac.ae Physiotherapy has evolved signifcantly into an essential professional discipline in in- dustrial and post-industrial society and is barely recognizable from its humble begin- nings more than a century ago. 1 Over the last two decades, physiotherapists have been presented with far more complex and chronic conditions, many with comorbidities re- quiring more intricate treatment plans due to demographic shifts, changing health and disease patterns, advanced technology, consumer expectations, and resources. To ad- dress this diversity in clinical encounters, it is prudent for physiotherapists to hone the skills to offer care that meets the unique requirements of each patient’s health, psycho- logical, social, cultural, and spiritual needs. 2 To address these challenges, physiotherapists must adopt and hone various skills, placing the physiotherapy educational curriculum at the center where professional skills are developed. Both hard and soft skills are crucial for everyday physiotherapy practice. Hard skills are cognitive and discipline-specifc technical skills. By contrast, soft skills are important personal attributes in nurturing the patient–therapist relationship and act as a complement to hard skills. Soft skills imply an optimal combination of emotion and thought and consist of ones ability to recognize, use, and manage feelings in oneself and in different consumers of physiotherapy services. These form the basis for effcient and effective delivery of physiotherapy services in a particular social context. Soft skills that are likely to beneft physiotherapy service delivery include but are not limited to situa- tion awareness, decision-making, communication, teamwork, and leadership. 3,4 A broad, comprehensive, and balanced diverse hard skills that are essential to cater to patient needs are laid in the physiotherapy curriculum. Although one cannot neglect the value of hard skills, it has recently been recognized that these skills are not suffcient for the success of a physiotherapy practice. Considering the diverse consumers of phys- iotherapy services with various backgrounds, fexibility is becoming a prerequisite that rests upon soft skills. Additionally, a defcit in soft skills can contribute to the deteriora- tion of hard skills. However, soft skills and their elements in physiotherapy education are seldom explicitly recognized or acknowledged. This calls for a proactive initiative on the part of academic institutions toward the development of soft skills as an integral part of academic physiotherapy training. It demands an integrated curriculum approach 0896-2960/22/$35.00 © 2022 by Begell House, Inc. www.begellhouse.com v Critical Reviews™ in Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, 34(3):v–vi (2022)