Early-career physiotherapists’ experiences of working with people with dementia: an exploratory phenomenological study

Objectives: Most research in the healthcare professions relating to interpersonal work with individuals who have dementia addresses domains where the practitioner is actively trained for this task. Little research has, however, investigated clinical interaction between physiotherapists and those with dementia. Moreover, contemporary tertiary physiotherapy education has to date provided little pertinent preparatory curriculum content. This paper, thus, reports findings from a UK-based exploratory study of early-career physiotherapists’ lived experiences of managing clinical encounters with people with dementia.

Design: A qualitative investigative framework was adopted. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and investigated using the core conventions of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.

Participants: With institutional ethical approval, N=5 early-career physiotherapists were purposively recruited. Of these, n=4 were female and n=1 was male, with a minimum of one year of post-qualification experience and a maximum of four (mean = 1.8), and an age range of 23 to 33 years (mean = 25.6).

Results: Three superordinate themes emerged: (1) Confidence, communication and experience. (2) Family members and significant others’ involvement in the care. (3) The learning journey.

Conclusion and Implications: Participants indicated that while their physiotherapy education did little to prepare them for the realities of working with individuals with dementia, providing more ‘raw information’ about dementia syndromes would have had only limited utility. Training around the emotional costs, social contexts and interpersonal demands of the work were viewed as a prospectively stronger grounding. Future research around curriculum development in physiotherapy, might encourage greater emphasis on communication, resilience and confidence around dementia.