Expanding physiotherapy placement capacity: clinical educators’ experiences of implementing a coaching approach to supervision

Purpose: Increasing by 50% the UK’s capacity for training students in the Allied Health Professions (AHPs), as recently mandated by Health Education England, represents a significant challenge for universities and healthcare providers alike. This challenge is, perhaps, felt most acutely in the domain of placement provision, where resources are not necessarily available to support the clinical supervision of large numbers of additional students. In response to this, a trial ‘coaching’ model of clinical supervision in physiotherapy was introduced by the researchers across two NHS Trusts in the North of England in 2020 and 2021. Commonly used in the practical training of medical students, this entails extensive group-based learning activity, rather than the one-to-one approach traditional across most AHP areas. The research reported herein explores the experiences of Clinical Educators (CEs) in implementing this approach for the first time, with a view to more clearly understanding its impacts upon their own working practices and those within their departments.