In October 2013, a month after Vantage Clinical Solutions (Bend, OR) owner Tannus Quatre began promoting pub-based events to bring physical therapists together in cities across the country, just a single group of PTs outside of Oregon had participated in what became known as PT Pub Night.
But soon, that first group from Boston was joined by a group of physical therapists from Seattle… then Chicago. It wasn’t long before Quatre (a licensed physical therapist in his own right) came to realize he’d tapped into something meaningful within the PT profession.
“My goal all along has been to strengthen the physical therapy profession by encouraging communication and establishing relationships among PTs and even students – to get them to sit down together over a pint to talk about their problems, their successes and their futures,” Quatre said. “After Boston, Seattle and Chicago signed on, I thought, ‘Wow, this could really take off.’ To what extent, I had no idea.”
Just 18 months later, with a pub night event held in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Tuesday, March 3, PT Pub Night hit the milestone of having hosted events in 200 cities throughout the U.S. and the world. In all, more than 600 PT Pub Night events have been held in 43 states and five foreign countries since September of 2013.
The mission of PT Pub Night is to facilitate relationships that improve the physical therapy profession. Such relationships are formed at local events, of course, but PT Pub Night organizers in Bend utilize their social media savvy to ensure participating physical therapists remain connected to others throughout the country via Twitter and Facebook.
Thanks almost exclusively to these social media efforts, PT Pub Night has realized a level of success that has even spanned beyond U.S. borders into the countries of Nigeria, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain and Japan.
“It amazes me to think of how many people within the physical therapy profession have met and connected over the past 18 months thanks to the efforts of PT Pub Night,” Quatre said. “This is an organic movement that relies on the efforts of local leaders to drive individual events, and the quickness at which this spread is a real testament of the desire of PTs to meet, connect and have conversations. This really bodes well for the future of physical therapy.”
In February, PT Pub Night hosted its largest-ever event in Indianapolis, IN – an event held in tandem with the Combined Sections Meeting (CSM) of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) that was attended by 700-plus physical therapists, physical therapy students and other related professionals from across the country.
PT Pub Night celebrated its one-year anniversary with a National PT Pub Night weekend in Chicago last August, and this fall, organizers are planning a nationwide event dubbed PT Untapped. Organized to coincide with National Physical Therapy Month in October, PT Untapped (Friday-Sunday, Oct. 9-11, 2015) will challenge physical therapists in participating cities to host service events that spotlight the role better movement plays in their communities.
“Physical therapists are passionate about how better movement can improve not just the lives of their clients, but the communities within which their clients live,” Quatre said. “We expect that physical therapists in our PT Pub Night communities will be eager to spotlight the ways they demonstrate this through community ‘give back’ projects, and that they use their ideas to challenge and inspire other communities to do the same.”
Vantage Clinical Solutions is a health care consulting, management and marketing company that assists private practices throughout the U.S. Founded in 2006 with the mission of improving health care through entrepreneurship, Vantage Clinical Solutions offers a number of business services, marketing products and management solutions dedicated to the needs of the private practice health care business. Vantage founded PT Pub Night in 2013. For more information, visit www.ptpubnight.com
