At the risk of labouring a topic of which many of us are tired, it feels like the right time to look back at the past two years.

I recall the conversations in the APA office in February 2020.

For a few weeks I was convinced that hysteria had taken over and that COVID-19 was going to prove to be a month-long distraction.

Even as we packed up our office and headed home in March, I thought we’d be back at our desks by May.

Perhaps it was wishful thinking or misguided optimism, but I was spectacularly wrong.

Two years of uncertainty, fear and community division (and unity) ensued in what will likely be the defining experience of a generation.

For our profession, the first question we grappled with was ‘Is physiotherapy an essential service?’.

The APA went into overdrive to lobby the federal government for the recognition of physiotherapy as such, demonstrating how compromised the hospital system would be if access to all primary care services—including allied health—was denied to patients.

This was by no means a shoo-in, so we were pleased and relieved to gain this recognition as well as the ability to remain open during lockdowns.

However, we knew that it wasn’t advisable for everyone to attend appointments face to face and the fight to secure funding for telehealth-enabled physiotherapy began.

In this, too, our profession was successful and we now have a new, financially supported avenue for offering healthcare.

As hospitals began preparing for a wave of COVID-19 cases, physiotherapists from different areas were recruited into ICU service.

One of the proudest moments for the APA in the past two years was the development of a groundbreaking online course for the upskilling of physiotherapists looking after COVID-19 patients in the ICU setting.

Created in partnership with NSW Health, this course has now been accessed by thousands of physiotherapists all over the world.

As 2020 turned into 2021, new challenges emerged.

COVID-19 was under control in many states but as autumn approached, outbreaks appeared inconsistently across the country.

The management of COVID-19 was delegated to state governments.

Each had its own assessment of risk versus reward in how outbreaks were managed and how comprehensive lockdowns were.

In Western Australia, for example, the government took an ultra-conservative stance and it took many weeks and three snap lockdowns for the APA to successfully lobby for physiotherapy services to remain open for essential care.

Other governments took a more nuanced position.

In recent weeks, clearly overwhelmed and tired governments and their departments have issued inconsistent and conflicting rules, requiring the diligent and active advocacy of peak bodies.

We are pleased to have secured a reasonable and sustainable close contact and isolation framework for physiotherapy private practice in the reopening road maps around Australia.

This sounds easy, but it takes persistence and even creativity in advocacy to secure these outcomes.

We have learned many things along the way as a profession and as an organisation.

We have set in stone our core belief that this profession is absolutely essential.

It provides an invaluable service to our communities and to the health system and the APA will advocate for the recognition of this long after COVID-19 is over.