Time to Elevate the Education of Clinical Exercise Physiologists: A Professional Doctorate Model

The increasing prevalence of noncommunicable diseases and multimorbidity negatively affects an individual’s quality of life and health trajectory; this trend and resultant personal and clinical outcomes are of significant concern. Healthy living (HL) behaviors (physical activity, dietary modification, smoking cessation, and medication compliance) are known to provide substantial health benefits that slow the progression or in some cases reverse the deleterious effects associated with inactivity and consumption of a diet high in sodium, fat content, added sugars, and energy-dense foods. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that a one-size-fits-all approach to HL interventions in populations at risk for or diagnosed with noncommunicable diseases is inadequate to promote optimization of health outcomes. Practitioners implementing HL interventions, such as clinical exercise physiologists (CEP), must instead understand the complexity or multimorbidity phenotypes and be able to effectively tailor programs for each condition. Although CEP may receive master’s level training in this area, the rise in patients with complex multimorbidity warrants consideration of elevating the professional expectations to better prepare CEP in training to deliver highly effective primary and secondary prevention HL interventions. Many licensed allied health professions (i.e., physical therapy, pharmacy, occupational therapy, nursing, nutrition, etc.) have recognized the call to move toward professional doctoral degree programs to better prepare practitioners within their field. This article proposes a professional doctorate degree program aimed at enhancing the training of CEP to become highly effective practitioners.