Developing understandings of clinical placement learning in three professions: Work that is critical to care

AbstractBackground: This study contributes further evidence that healthcare students’ learning is affected by underlying assumptions about knowledge, learning and work.Aims: To explore educators and students’ understandings of early clinical placement learning in three professions (medicine, nursing and audiology) and examine the profound impacts of these understandings on students’ learning and healthcare work.Methods: Narrative interviews were undertaken with 40 medicine, nursing, and audiology students and 19 educators involved in teaching these student cohorts. Interview transcripts were read repeatedly and interpreted using current practice-based understandings of learning.Results: Across interviews and professions, students and educators made distinctions between aspects of clinical placements which they understood as “learning” and those which they tended to disregard as “work”. In their descriptions of learning in clinical workplaces, medicine and nursing students and educators privileged activiti...