Between clinical and educational practice: how educational physiotherapists negotiate their professional role and identity in Chile

The incorporation of support professionals into mainstream schools raises questions about how roles developed outside education are interpreted and enacted in educational settings. This study examined how physiotherapists working within Chile’s School Integration Programme (Programa de Integración Escolar, PIE) construct and negotiate their professional role and identity, in relation to educational inclusion. Using a qualitative interpretative approach, eleven physiotherapists from different regions of Chile participed in semi-estructured interviews, analised through reflexive thematic analysis informed by a subject-centred perspective on professional agency and identity. Findings indicate that professional identity is neither a straightforward transfer of clinical roles nor a replacement of health expertise with an exclusively educational orientation. Instead, it is negotiated through institutional expectations, professional understandings of disciplinary responsabilities, and organisational and relational conditions. Diagnosis-related expectations coexist with efforts to connect movement and corporeality to curriculum and participation. The findings underscore the need for professional education that links physiotherapist knowledge to educational objetives, organisational conditions that enable sustained interprofessional collaboration, and school-based support responsive to curricular and participation needs beyond diagnostic categories.