The process and challenges of obtaining and sustaining clinical placements for nursing and allied health students

Abstract

Clinical professional experiences are essential to any nursing or allied health programme. There is an increasing demand for, and global lack of, clinical placements for nursing and allied health students. The results provide nursing and allied health educators and managers a framework for planning clinical placement procurement, and assisting in decision-making and developing strategies and processes for practice.

Learning relationships in community-based service-learning: a social network analysis

“…In programs where advanced students can be expected to have some degree of expertise, our data shows that reciprocal learning relations can flourish under a collaborative model where one clinical educator supervises two or more students concurrently [3]. A number of studies consistently report overall experience by clinical educators and students in community-based placements [7, 9, 10, 20]. We suggest that future research could adapt the methodology of our social learning network analysis to local contexts.…”

“…Clinical placements for allied health students are in short supply internationally, leading to the development and evaluation of a number of models to maintain learning and teaching capacity [1–5] One consequence has been the development of community–based service-learning models [3, 6, 7] reflecting a move away from relying on traditional hospital based placements. There is a growing literature describing various aspects of such placements, including program design and implementation, learning outcomes assessment, the effects of the learning environment [8, 9], involvement of the community [10–13], students’ learning strategies, supervisory arrangements, and student engagement with patients/clients as well as with their peers.…”

COVID‐19 and student nurses: A view from England

“…Students who do not wish to undertake these extended placements will follow a “theory‐only” route for the foreseeable future, deferring their clinical placements. This will mean that they must “catch‐up” on required practice hours later, likely to lead to an increased pressure on the students and on the clinical areas, which have been struggling to build capacity for student learning for some time (Taylor, Angel, Nyanga, & Dickson, 2017).…”

Adaptation and validation of the clinical supervision self-assessment tool among registered nurses

“…Clinical placement also termed as workplace experience is an essential component for preregistration nursing students in their programme of study (Birks et al, 2017;Brynildsen et al, 2014;Levett-Jones et al, 2015). These clinical placements generally occur within the acute hospital setting (Taylor et al, 2017) although other new clinical placement opportunities for nursing students in non-acute settings have been explored (Patterson et al, 2016). Effective supervision during clinical placements is essential to ensure that pre-registration nursing students can provide safe and competent care when they enter the workforce.…”