Employing a coaching model of supervision during physiotherapy placements: charting the student experience

Purpose: Placement capacity during physiotherapy degree programmes is presently under unprecedented stress. In the wake of COVID-19, Health Education England has moved to increase university places across all Allied Health Professions (AHPs) by 50%, without any reduction in quality of education. In order to facilitate this increase in student numbers, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and healthcare teams are being asked to change their ways of working and consider alternative supervision models. One such model is the group-based ‘coaching’ approach which is commonly used in the education of medical students but seldom employed on AHP programmes, where one-to-one supervision remains the default. The research reported herein was tasked with qualitatively elucidating student experiences of such a coaching supervision initiative, introduced by the research team across a set of undergraduate and postgraduate physiotherapy placements in two NHS Trusts the north of England during 2020 and 2021.