Transforming simulation in clinical education: is pre-placement hybrid learning valuable to healthcare students?

Abstract

Michael Harper,Lesley-Jane Eales-Reynolds,Christian Markham1

Innovation in clinical learning is reported as being useful in preparing health and social care students for clinical patient care, but historically these learners have relied on traditional pedagogies including didactic classroom learning and apprenticeship „practice�?? on live patients in a clinical environment. This paper investigates whether students find it useful to augment traditional learning methods with simulation and video (hybrid learning) as a pre-junct to learning in clinical placement. Replacing the usual initial clinical placement with a 12-week study block employing hybrid-teaching techniques reformed the traditional curriculum for Operating Department Practitioner students. An interpretative phenomenographic methodology was adopted for this study and data was collected through anonymous focus group interviews. The data support two concepts that 1) confidence and self-belief perpetuate the desire for new learning and 2) multi-professional learning develops a professional approach in terms of communication, care intervention and thinking processes. The data presented was obtained using a qualitative phenomenographic approach and the results infer specific advantages of hybrid learning to the participants to supplement traditional teaching methods by addressing theoretical limitations of learning and inequity of placement experiential learning. Limitations to this study are the absence of a control group to directly compare against apprenticeship learning methods alone and the sample group being single site, single cohort.