Clinical practice workbooks
21 April 2009
As a part of initial introductory clinical placements in years 1 and 2, students complete Clinical Practice Workbooks. The workbooks are designed to enhance the clinical experience by encouraging student to seek out, perform and document specific structured tasks, and to reflect on their performance. Workbook activities require students to relate the clinical impairments documented in assessment tasks to the patients' quality of life assessed through discussions with patients. In addition, the workbooks encourage students to learn about the physiotherapist's work environment through tasks that require reflection on management and safety issues, manual handling, and equipment use. Clinical reasoning is enhanced through tasks that require the student to discuss observations from patient charts or interviews that are necessary for clinical decision-making. Students present a patient case to their peers following their first placement, and presentations are guided by their clinical workbook activities.
Year Level : (First and Second)
The clinical workbooks are intended to enhance learning from the clinical placement experience, by requiring the student to document and reflect on their experiences. For example, in year 1 the students learn about the physiotherapist's work environment through workbook items encourage students to seek out induction information such as clinic management, safety and manual handling policies. Year 1 students are also required to reflect on the impact that physical deficits have on a patient's quality of life after they have performed one or more measurements on a patient (ROM, strength and balance), and interviewed them about aspects of activities of daily living. In year 2 students begin to explore clinical reasoning, documentation and outcome measures used in the clinical setting by describing and reflecting on patients whom they have observed or treated. They are also required to describe aspects of safety with electrophysical agents and exercise equipment, including patient explanations, warnings and consent. It is expected that these activities enhance the clinical placement experience by providing the student with specific goals to be achieved and allowing the student to reflect on how effective they were at achieving those goals.
The opportunity that students have to reflect on their own progress, shortcomings and strengths, and the process of comparing their learning experiences at different clinical site makes this activity an effective self-directed learning process.
Marking the clinical workbooks gives teaching staff a better picture of the student's insight into the clinical experience, and of the students' ability to transfer learning tasks to the practical setting. Reflective tasks indicate whether the students are able to express how their actions and observations affect patient outcomes and level of care. Formal evaluation of the students' perceptions about the usefulness of completing the workbooks has not yet been undertaken.
There has much variation in the quality and quantity of responses to the reflective tasks, but the majority of students appear to put quite a lot of time into their clinical workbooks.
Yes. We would like to further structure some of the workbook tasks, to encourage students to spend more time on reflective tasks, and less time on other tasks.
A change to the distribution and submission of completed workbooks is currently being trialed. An internet version of the workbooks has been developed, so that students can submit their workbooks online. The online version allows for only limited text for some activities, and for other activities students are allowed to expand their responses as they wish.