Allied health pre-entry student clinical placement capacity: can it be sustained?

Conclusion Sustaining pre-entry student placements requires stakeholder flexibility and responsiveness and is underpinned by collaboration, information and resource sharing. Dedicated clinical education positions were highly valued and seen as a key contributor to placement sustainability.What is known about the topic? The increasing demand for student placements and strategies used to enhance placement capacity are well known. To date, there have been limited studies investigating cross-sectoral trends and health service enablers and barriers to sustaining responses to placement demand.What does this paper add? This paper describes outcomes of a clinical placement capacity building initiative within public health services, developed from a unique opportunity to provide funding through an industrial agreement. It presents key allied health staff and university partner perspectives on enablers to sustaining placement supply in an environment of increasing placement demand.What are the implications for practitioners? This paper demonstrates that key enablers for the sustainability of placement provision are collaboration between university and health sectors, continuation of management support for dedicated clinical education staff, outcome data reporting and statewide profession-specific governance and leadership. It supports current practices of profession-specific and interprofessional clinical education resource and strategy development and the sharing of expertise for sust...
Source: Australian Health Review - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Aust Health Rev Source Type: research