Abstract

Multidisciplinary educational curriculum development is a fundamental part of my role as an academic. In practice, the term historically meant that students were segregated into their respective professional disciplines and taught in ‘optional modules’ of relevance only to them. One of the aims of my work is to build capacity within and between health-care professional disciplines through curricula which allow them to remain together in one cohort. In relation to health, this can be seen as improving interprofessional working. Following the implementation of such a curriculum, I needed a means of establishing what students thought of their experience across the programme in order to see how best to further develop or amend it in the light of their comments. This case study offers an insight into the process of choosing phenomenology as a philosophy underpinning a method and the decision-making involved in designing a phenomenological study. The reader is introduced to the relative complexity of interpreting qualitative data from a phenomenological study and the processes underpinning it. Particular attention is given to the emergent themes resulting from the data and the processes behind formulating this into a cogent discussion which clearly outlined the emergent theory from it.