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Learning to become an osteopath in Italy: a qualitative study of first-year students in a newly established
Clizia Cazzarolli1,2,3, Andrea Turrina4,5,6, Laura Furri7
1School of Physiotherapy, University of Verona, Verona, Italy. ricerca@eomitalia.it.
Objective:
To explore how first-year undergraduate osteopathy students construct their emerging professional identity during early education within the first Italian university-based osteopathy degree programme, with particular attention to the role of embodied learning, early clinical exposure, and institutional uncertainty.
Design:
A qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews, analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.
Setting:
A newly established undergraduate osteopathy degree programme at the University of Verona, Italy.
Participants:
A total of 17 first-year osteopathy students were involved through purposive sampling to capture variation in age, gender and educational background.
Focus Of The Study:
Students' meaning-making of emerging professional identity, with particular attention to embodied learning, early clinical exposure, relational recognition, and institutional uncertainty.
Results:
Four themes were developed from the analysis. (1) "Entering an undefined profession: between privilege and uncertainty", where students experienced enrolment as meaningful while navigating an evolving institutional context. (2) "Learning through the body: from studying osteopathy to feeling like an osteopath", highlighting the gap between theoretical knowledge and embodied confidence. (3) "The internship: legitimacy, exposure and vulnerability", where clinical encounters were described as simultaneously supporting and challenging students' emerging sense of professional legitimacy. (4) "Being an osteopath-in-training: a provisional, fragile and relational identity", illustrating how participants described negotiating their emerging professional identity through interaction, recognition, and institutional uncertainty.
Conclusion:
Early professional identity in a newly established osteopathy programme was experienced as provisional, embodied, and relational. Participants reported their early professional identity as closely linked not only to clinical learning, but also to the institutional conditions in which they learned, practised, and began to see themselves as future professionals. Our findings suggest that participants experienced institutional uncertainty not merely as a contextual challenge but as an important dimension of how they made sense of their developing competencies, legitimacy and recognition during early professional education. Recognising and supporting these processes may strengthen educational practice in health professions that are newly integrated into higher education, as well as in other evolving academic contexts.
