Abstract:

High quality clinical education placements are widely recognised as an essential element of healthcare undergraduate programmes (O’Brien et. al., 2019), and in the United Kingdom (UK) these placements are influenced by regulatory body requirements. The UK, Health & Care Professions Council (HCPC) has the legal responsibility for regulating 15 healthcare professions, including Physiotherapy. To achieve this, the HCPC has established Standards of Proficiency for Physiotherapists (HCPC, 2020), which explicitly identify the knowledge, skills and professional behaviours that undergraduate learners need to achieve as they progress on their ‘novice to expert’ journey within the clinical practice domain (Benner, 1984). Alongside this, higher education institutions have the responsibility of ensuring learner’s competence development is accurately assessed/captured across multiple clinical practice sites, bringing in complex issues of validity, reliability and inference (Tavares et. al., 2018).

In response to this, the School of Health Sciences at the University of Liverpool (UOL) adopted the use of a bespoke iPad app and web portal to assess Physiotherapy students whilst on clinical placement. The system was customised to incorporate previously established competency criteria, which prior to 2014 had required students and their clinical supervisors to complete paper-based books. The switch to the iPad app allowed clinical educators, working with students on their clinical placements to record student performance against established criteria and for this data to be securely stored and accessed through a web portal. Whereas previously, the UOL programme team had to schedule clinical site visits to review student progress. Access to data through the web portal provides the programme team with the ability to continually monitor students and provide more timely interventions, if the data suggests that students are not meeting the required HCPC standards. Additionally, students are able to access their own data on the web portal giving them oversight of their own development and the opportunity to take responsibility for their own learning.

In this presentation, the authors will review the development of the iPad App and web portal, its use since 2014, and review data from four completed cohorts of students to determine if the approach has delivered the expected outcomes.

References:
[1] Benner, P (1984). Novice to Expert- Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice. Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley Publishing
[2] HCPC (2020). The Standards of Proficiency for Physiotherapists 2013. Accessed 8th November 2020. Retrieved from https://www.hcpc-uk.org/resources/standards/standards-of-proficiency-physiotherapists/
[3] O'Brien, A.T., McNeil, K., Dawson, A. (2019). The student experience of clinical supervision across health disciplines – Perspectives and remedies to enhance clinical placement. Nursing Education in Practice, 34.:48-55
[4] Tavares, W., Brydges, R., Myre, P., Prpic, J., Turner, L., Yelle, R., Huiskamp, M. (2018). Applying Kane’s validity framework to a simulation based assessment of clinical competence. Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice, 23, 2 : 1573-1677.

Keywords:

Physiotherapy, Clinical Competency, iPad, Assessment.