Professional identity development in physiotherapy: from India to the UK

The life and experiences of Indian physiotherapists studying in the UK give a real and ‘lived’ dimension to the global phenomenon of health professional migration. Physiotherapists mainly emigrating from South East Asia, attracted by better employment conditions in the UK (Buchan 2005), seek Higher Education Institution qualifications in the UK, to help them engage with issues of professional regulation as well as cultural change (Zurn et al. 2004). The MSc physiotherapy programme at Sheffield Hallam University exposes students to both Western pedagogies, as well as ‘taken for granted’ ideas about physiotherapy practice. How Indian students negotiate the tensions in meaning making around their professional practice (Fontana 2001) is of interest to me as a tutor on the programme. The construct used to explore this phenomenon is professional identity, since it is a means of not only recognising the impact of learning experiences on individual members of particular cultures, but also generates insights into collective responses (Sazberger-Wittenber and Osborne 1983) and therefore also indicates contextual and structural issues in terms of identity adjustment. A study was undertaken, collecting data through in-depth, active interviewing (Holstein and Gubrium 1995) with six students. The methodology of analysis was principally one of grounded theory as a route for exploring physiotherapy identities (Wertz 2011). The results exposed depths of difficulty in transferring physiotherapy practices from one country to another and the experience has challenged me in terms of my own attitudes.