Learning physiotherapy : the impact of formal education and professional experience

Abstract: The aim is to describe and analyse physiotherapeutic learning through formal education and professional experience. The investigation focuses on the students' ways of experiencing the concepts of Health, Movement, Function and Interaction. Two groups of physiotherapy students at the Faculty of Health Sciences in Linköping, Sweden, were interviewed on two occasions respectively. The interviews were carried during the second and last term of the formal programme and after 18 months of professional experience. Data were analysed according to the phenomenographic approach and to the principles of contextual analysis. The students' conceptions varied qualitatively, but an analysis of the internal relationships between the concepts revealed that the most common perspectives after completing the formal education were consistently holistic or mixed. This pattern was also most common after 18 months of professional work. The subjects' ways of experiencing the Interaction within a patient encounter were described in four main categories; Mutuality, Technicalism, Authority and Juxtaposition. Mutuality and Technicalism denoted an integration of the communicative and problem-solving processes, the former category from a patient-centred and the latter from a physiotherapist-centred perspective. Authority and Juxtaposition denoted a separation of the processes, the former from a physiotherapist-centred perspective and the latter from a patient-centred perspective. Both separated and integrated perspectives were common after completing the formal education. After 18 months of professional practice the Mutuality category dominated.