$177k to diversify clinical teaching

The Department of Community Emergency Health and Paramedic Practice together with the campus's Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy departments will explore 'Reducing the clinical placement burden on health services - creating a contemporary model of simulated clinical education using innovative teaching methods for multiple health care professions'.

The Centre for Ambulance and Paramedic Studies already use simulated environments for clinical teaching, including the recently launched trauma simulation complex.

The State Government has allocated $8.4m over four years to help health services meet forecast growth in undergraduate clinical placements with the aim of improving workforce supply and ensuring a sustainable health system.

According to Community Emergency Health and Paramedic Practice lecturer Brett Williams, the proposal aims to contribute to an increased clinical training capacity by the creation of a ‘virtual patient environment' (VPE).

"The VPE has the capacity to produce teaching and learning resources that actually increase students' clinical learning without the need for actual patient contact," he explained.

The new addition to clinical training will not completely replace clinical placements, but will reduce the time required for actual patient contact and will have students better prepared to maximise their learning from that contact.

The proposal has the potential to reduce student-patient contact and overall clinical placement time thereby reducing the burden and competition for placement positions between disciplines while creating a more organised coordination of clinical placements.

The utilisation of IT applications has the capacity to create a ‘new’ model of workforce that will provide not only continued education and training capacities, but also the ability for a flexible mode of training providing large-scale opportunities to health care students.