About EduGlobal

Go somewhere else. Come back different.

That is the whole idea, and it has been since Mike Arnall started this in 2006. I came into it early, as one of the schools sending students, and I run it now. This is how that happened.

Since 2006

883

students placed.

904

site placements — 21 of those students split one rotation between two facilities.

US programs sent them.

partner sites today, across Italy, Switzerland and Luxembourg.

What it actually changes →

Why this exists

The thing that changes a clinician is leaving.

You can learn to treat a shoulder anywhere. What you cannot learn at home is how much of your practice was your training and how much of it was simply the room you learned in — the equipment that happened to be on the wall, the documentation someone handed you, the assumptions about what a patient does between visits that nobody ever said out loud because nobody in the building disagreed with them.

The only way to see that is to stand somewhere else and find that none of it travelled. It is uncomfortable for about a week. Then it is the most useful thing that happens to you in three years of school.

That is the whole argument for EduGlobal and it has not changed since 2006. Everything else — the housing, the car rental, the affiliation agreements, the 65 university programs, the insurance, the visas — is scaffolding around one idea: that a student who practises inside a health system built on a different principle comes home a better clinician than the one who stayed.

Mike Arnall started it in 2006 with one university and one clinic — Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania, and Fondazione Turati in Gavinana, a village up in the Apennines. Umbertide came after that. Linda Bartalesi was there in the first year and is still here, which tells you most of what you need to know about how this has been run.

The people who carried it

Before it was an organisation, it was a few people in Italy.

Programmes like this one are usually described from the American end, as though the hard part were recruiting students. It isn't. The hard part is that a hospital in Gavinana or Pistoia or Portogruaro has to want a foreign student in its clinic on a Tuesday morning — has to make room, absorb the language, take the teaching on top of a full caseload — and keep wanting it, year after year, because someone they trust asked them to.

Linda Bartalesi took her laurea in physiotherapy in Florence in 2006, the same year this started, and has spent twenty years as an orthopaedic and neurological physiotherapist and clinical instructor at Fondazione Turati. Riccardo Zanola has been doing this since 2012. Between them they are the reason a student who lands at Pisa with two suitcases and no Italian ends up somewhere with a bed, a car, a clinic expecting them and someone to call at ten at night.

That relationship is not transferable and it is not purchasable. It is the actual asset here, and it was built by people who are still doing it.

How it came to me

I was one of the schools sending students.

I am Australian. I qualified at Curtin University in Perth in 1994 and then left — sports medicine in the United Kingdom, eventually a career in the United States I did not plan and would not have had if I had stayed, then teaching clinicians across Europe and in Africa. Almost everything I have professionally came from being somewhere I had no particular business being.

I met Mike while I was teaching in Italy and we became friends. At the time I was director of clinical education at Pacific University, which is how Pacific became the second programme to send students here — I was the one sending them. Then I kept teaching, and kept coming back, and got steadily more interested in what kept happening to the students who went.

In 2020, with COVID on top of everything else, Mike retired. Fourteen years of relationships in Italy and nobody to hold them; it could simply have stopped there. I did not want to watch it die, so I took it over.

Not out of duty. I love to travel, and I do not think there is much you can do for a young clinician that beats putting them somewhere unfamiliar early — in front of people who do this work differently, inside a health system arranged on another principle, at the age when it still changes how you think rather than only what you know. They come home with a bigger sense of how things work and how they could work, and they spend the rest of their careers using it in their own country.

So what I am trying not to break is the part that was never mine. There are 904 completed placements behind this. My job is to give it the systems and the standards it never had, and to leave intact the thing that actually makes it work — that somewhere in Tuscany, a clinician who has met every one of us decides your student is worth the trouble.

A narrow street in a hill town, stone buildings on both sides, shutters closed against the afternoon

Meet our team

The people behind every placement.

Brett Windsor, PT, PhD, MPA

President

Brett qualified as a physiotherapist at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, in 1994. He is APTA board certified as an orthopedic clinical specialist (OCS, 2000), completed the NAIOMT Clinical Fellowship in Manual Therapy in 2003, and took his fellowship in the American Academy of Orthopedic Manual Therapy (FAAOMPT) in 2004. He has been in academia since 2008 and is a professor of physical therapy at Northern Arizona University, and serves as senior vice president of clinical excellence with Physical Rehabilitation Network. He lives in Southwest Florida with his wife, Susan.

Linda Bartalesi, PT

Vice President of European Operations

Linda works with EduGlobal students and host rehabilitation facilities to coordinate every aspect of the clinical experience. She graduated in 2006 from the University of Florence with a laurea in physiotherapy and subsequently completed a six-year osteopathic manual therapy program at Florence's Scuola Italiana di Osteopatia e Terapie Manuali (SIOTEMA). She has 20 years of experience as an orthopedic and neurological physiotherapist and CI at Fondazione F. Turati in Gavinana. Her post-graduate training includes myofascial techniques and the McKenzie approach. Linda is an avid hiker and snowboarder. She lives with her son Silvio in Abetone, in the Apennine Alps.

Riccardo Zanola, PT

Senior Director of Student Services

Riccardo has been a dedicated member of the EduGlobal team since 2012. He assists students throughout Italy, ensuring smooth experiences — from clinical site coordination to accommodations, car rentals, and the practical details that make a successful experience possible. He earned his degree in Physical Therapy from the University of Florence in 2009 and currently serves as a shoulder therapist at a private practice in Pistoia. Riccardo lives in Prato, near Florence.

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