Little by little: accumulating evidence for a novel form of professional development for clinical educators using ideas from implementation science

Few educational researchers obtain the requisite funding to scale out promising professional development activities and must therefore resort to incremental strategies to gather evidence about effectiveness. Drawing on Implementation Science, this article reports on the ‘replication’ of a single Professional Learning Community for clinical educators in an Australian rural health service (an average attendance of four participants), which the authors had initially trialled in general practice settings. They describe how the intervention was implemented, using different methodological approaches to investigate whether the intervention was implemented with acceptable fidelity and was effective in this new context. They provide qualitative and quantitative evidence to claim that the Professional Learning Community was implemented with high fidelity. They highlight the intervention’s components that they think are essential to its success and offer some insights about how the intervention works in the form of a programme theory. Attaining similar findings in this new case provides evidence about the transferability of this form of professional development and further evidence about the value of a group of clinical educators inquiring collaboratively into their ‘concerns’ about their educational practice.