Clinical Education in the Health Professions - Clare Delany

Clinical settings are dynamic educational spaces that present both opportunities and barriers to learning and teaching. Designed to inform, challenge and educate health professionals about the evidence underpinning clinical education practices and outcomes, this multi-disciplinary book brings together important concepts in healthcare education and addresses context and processes of learning, professional identity and socialisation, feedback and assessment, ethics, and inter-professional education. The authors encourage teaching and learning practices based on research findings, expertise and innovation, and the development of individual teaching methods and styles from a theoretical base that provides relevant principles, direction and support. With clear links between theory, research and practice, collaboration from a broad range of clinical disciplines, and models for learning and teaching grounded in empirical research, Clinical Education in the Health Professions will become a standard reference for all health professionals and educators.

• examines patterns of practice in clinical education in the health professions, using a qualitative research focus
• identifies the roles of university and clinical educators, students, peers and patients in clinical education
• highlights implicit tensions in clinical education practice and presents strategies to identify and address such tensions
• challenges the reader to consider new approaches to clinical education that may optimise students' learning and enculturation into the health professions

Despite claims that clinical education lies at the heart of health care education, little empirical research has explored what constitutes effectiveness in clinical teaching and learning. This book draws on the research, ideas and expertise of researchers who have observed and researched different aspects of clinical education. Their research has spanned clinical education topics including professional identity and socialisation, assessment and feedback, pedagogical methods, clinical reasoning, dealing with ambiguity, dealing with diversity and interprofessional education. This book has been designed to synthesise empirical clinical education research and ideas about the context, value, processes and outcomes of clinical education. Each chapter presents a research based facet of clinical education as a platform from which knowledge and future research in clinical education can occur. The authors entice the reader to reconceptualise facets of their own teaching and learning practices based on research findings, expertise and innovation.