In the early sixty’s the royal medical service sent two of its nursing staff to the United Kingdom to have some physiotherapy training on how to manage certain patients with physical problems at a time those patients were taken care of by nurses only. This marked the beginning of physiotherapy in Jordan.
In around late sixty’s the Jordanian Rehabilitation Center was established in AL Ashrafeyyah (later Al Basheer Hospital) by Cheshire homes society in cooperation with ministry of health by funded by the World Health Organization. Practitioners graduated from this institute were titled “ Nurse physiotherapist”. In 1968 one of these graduates was sent to Tahran – Iran to receive a training in physiotherapy.
This center graduated many patches, the material which was taught was prepared by physicians and there were three physiotherapy lectures sponsored by WHO.
In 1973 the Paramedical institute was established and a physiotherapy program of three years course was started. This program was the duplicate of the one being taught in UK at that time.
The teaching staff included instructors from UK and Sweden and a bachelor holder ( in physiotherapy) from Cairo University – Egypt.
The last patch graduated in 2004and the physiotherapy program was closed because . A physiotherapy program was started in three Jordanian universities in 1999.
Following the establishment of the PT college in the University of Jordan(UJ), another two physiotherapy colleges were opened in the same year in the Hashemite University (HU) and the Jordan University for Sciences and Technology (JUST) under the umbrella of the Faculty of Allied Health Sciences and the Faculty of Medical Applied Sciences respectively.
Physiotherapy in the three universities is a 4 years program leading to the bachelor degree (BSc) and the first patch of physiotherapists was graduated from the three universities in 2003.
