Clinical placements in residential care facilities part 2: negative experiences
Abstract
Objective: This paper analyses clinical placements undertaken by final year undergraduate paramedic students in residential aged care facilities. Barriers to effective teaching and learning are identified in order to tailor such placements to better meet future health system demands.
Design: The research employed qualitative methodology using thematic analysis to identify key themes in the data.
Setting: A cohort of final year paramedic undergraduate students (
Method: This component of the research involved the collection and analysis of qualitative data from student and mentor feedback meetings during placement.
Results: Barriers to teaching and learning while on clinical placement were identified and categorised into a number of key themes. These include: a lack of clarity of the placement structure, inadequate clinical liaison support, and limited contact with residents and facility staff.
Conclusions: Developing placements that consider the barriers to effective learning identified in this research will facilitate further development of quality, evidence-based, best practice models of undergraduate paramedic student learning in residential aged care facilities.
Providing quality clinical placements for undergraduate paramedic students to prepare them for the looming dementia epidemic (Korczyn and Vakhapova, 2007; World Health Organization (WHO), 2011) is a significant challenge for health systems across the globe (World Health Organization and Alzheimer's Disease International, 2012). Concerned that paramedic students are not adequately prepared for this epidemiological transition (Omran, 2005), the Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre's (WDREC) Teaching Aged Care Facilities Program (TACFP) facilitated the introduction of clinical placements in residential aged care facilities (RACFs) as a compulsory component of the undergraduate paramedic degree course.
These placements, first offered in 2011, aimed to provide opportunities for students to develop an extended skill set and enable them to work more effectively with people with dementia, and their carers. This is a pioneering clinical placement programme, and there is a lacuna in the literature reporting on such placements. As such, this paper will underpin the development of an evidence base and support the expansion of best practice clinical placements in this emerging field. It is intended the findings discussed in this research will be translatable to other jurisdictions that have similar models of undergraduate paramedic student education.
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