A methodology to facilitate making health professional learners visible as health professional contributors in clinical placements

Clinical workplace learning literature tends to focus on the benefits for students and the burdens for health services rather than on mutual benefits of clinical placements. With competition for student placements and changing funding models, there is a need for research designs that can provide evidence of the benefits of clinical placements for health services in addition to the benefits for students’ learning. Through a series of studies investigating the bi-directional benefits of health professional students’ clinical placements, the authors developed and trialled the Clinical Placement Research Framework, a methodology informed conceptually by communities of practice and related theories. The framework consists of multiple data collection methods to capture multifaceted and contextualised accounts of how students can learn from and contribute to patient care through work as their expertise develops. A multi-year-level approach allows for identifying the trajectory of contributions as students’ skills and autonomy increase. Since the case study in 2017 at one health service in Melbourne, Australia, the Clinical Placement Research Framework has been implemented by other researchers as well as the authors in community dietetics, general practice in two university settings and in a national nursing and midwifery study. This paper details the underpinning methodology of the framework and provides an overview of its implementation and outcomes, including the reported impacts for students, health services, patients and their families.