Changing the landscape of physiotherapy practice education: clinical educators' experiences of a rotational pilot initiative in England

Purpose: Practice-based learning is a mandatory element of physiotherapy training which facilitates students to apply acquired theoretical knowledge in a clinical setting. Instrumental to the success of any placement scheme, meanwhile, is the work of Clinical Educators (CEs), for whom the challenge of managing multidimensional roles has been well-documented; this includes being skilled practitioners, acting as role models and juggling competing needs of patients, students, and associated administrative tasks. As the number of physiotherapy programs in the UK has increased over recent years, there has been a corollary need to explore new means of ensuring (a) there are sufficient clinical placement opportunities for all students, and (b) that the quality of clinical education does not decline, without (c) placing additional or unmanageable strain on CEs. This paper reports qualitative findings relating to the experiences of CEs with respect to a trial of a novel model of placement provision not widely used (or researched for efficacy) in physiotherapy to date: ‘placement rotation’. Herein, as an ostensible single placement, a group of students completed three ‘rotations’ in different clinical areas, but with consistent set of CEs, within a single NHS Foundation Trust in the northwest of England.