On the 16th of August four second year students from Physiotherapy left Cape Town for a two week exchange programme in Oslo. The visit was part of a larger project exploring how culture and society influences our approaches to rehabilitation, and not only includes visits to clinical sites, but also an immersion into the culture of Norway.

To this end our students spent a lot of time socialising with Norwegian students and exploring different aspects of their culture and society, as a way of developing a deeper understanding of what it feels like to be Norwegian. The UWC students then explore how this different way of being might influence Norwegian approaches to health and rehabilitation. The idea is that we will look at this health system as an outsider and then use what we learn to investigate our own health system. The Norwegian cohort will visit Cape Town in March 2020 and will do the same thing.

In addition, the students will be using their experiences to build up a collection of resources exploring the idea of Internationalisation at home, which is being published on the project website. These resources will not only include the students’ lived experience of the visit but also video lectures, readings, and interactions with othe physiotherapy cohorts from other countries (for example, the UK, Bangladesh, and Brazil). Over time, we hope that the project website becomes a resource for anyone interested in exploring concepts related to Internationalisation at home projects.