Perceptions of midwifery students, mentors, and supervisors on the use of clinical teaching portfolio in Rwanda

Abstract

<jats:p>Background and objective: The clinical teaching portfolio is a practical tool for integrating theory and practice towards the growth of midwifery students. Both paper-based portfolios (PBP) and electronic portfolios (EP) are known and recognized as tools that can assist midwifery educators to develop students’ analytical and critical thinking. Hence, midwives are required to maintain a professional portfolio to reflect their development of knowledge, skills, and attitude. The aim of this study was to explore the perceptions of midwifery students, mentors, and supervisors about the use of paper-based and electronic clinical teaching portfolios.Methods: A qualitative descriptive design was carried out with 20 participants including midwifery students, mentors, and supervisors. Using purposive sampling, participants were recruited from two selected clinical teaching hospitals. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim by the research team members. Six steps of thematic analysis were followed during the inductive analysis of collected data. Results: Three themes emerged from data analyses which include clinical teaching and learning, encountering barriers in the use of the clinical teaching portfolio, and preference among the clinical teaching portfolio users.Conclusions: The findings of this study highlighted the importance of a clinical teaching portfolio in the promotion of midwifery clinical teaching. This study indicated that there is a need to respect the student-clinical instructor ratio and to equip the users with the required skills in order to fully benefit from the use of a clinical teaching portfolio.</jats:p>

Can ePortfolios Scaffold Competency-based Workplace Learning in Low-income Countries? Lessons Learnt from a Qualitative Pilot Study in Midwifery Education in Rwanda

“…Participants needed to fulfil the following inclusion criteria: be a midwifery student, have a supervisor and/or mentor allocated at two selected clinical teaching hospitals, be familiar with the existing PBP, have been introduced to the ePortfolio and be willing to be part of the study. Midwifery students, mentors, and supervisors who were not enrolled in Medbook© and who had not been exposed to existing PBP and ePortfolio were excluded [29].…”

“…Initially, 12 students, 4 mentors and 4 supervisors were selected to participate in the project. In an earlier publication [29] perceptions from all the selected participants were reported. In this study, only ePortfolio users participated.…”

“…During a 2-year funded innovation project, a competency-based ePortfolio, based on an evidencebased Continuous Workplace Learning Competency Framework [10], was piloted at two clinical teaching hospitals in Kigali (Rwanda). Recently, the authors published the results of the project, describing perceptions on the use of the clinical teaching portfolio (PBP and ePortfolio) of midwifery students, mentors (hospital) and supervisors (university) [29]. This paper focuses on the perceptions of the ePortfolio users, especially on the suitability of the framework and the ePortfolio tool.…”