by: Dianne van Eck
Placements are hard work! There is no denying this from anyone working in this space in higher education. The supply and demand pressures are huge – there are never enough sites or providers. Students are expecting more of their placements – the government will soon be paying some students to go on placement. Staff are undertaking complex, often manual work, despite their system solutions. It is a relentless, annual cycle that is now almost always devoid of downtime.
The usual accredited placements of nursing, midwifery, health, medicine, dentistry, vet science, education and engineering have been included in curriculum for many years. More recently other disciplines have been offering either voluntary or mandated placements or internships including business, law, arts and the sciences.
DVE has been delivering projects focused on improving placement and Work Integrated Learning (WIL) management for over 17 years. From developing our own niche clinical placement management system (CPMS) in 2012 which manages regional and rural students on health placements in four universities (University of Adelaide, UniSA, University of Sydney and Flinders University), we have reviewed and improved placement business processes, undertaken benchmarking, worked with UK Universities, delivered webinars and presented at conferences. DVE has worked with many Australian universities to improve this essential and critical activity.
Interestingly, the findings I delivered at the NAFEA (National Association of Field Experience Administrators) Conference in 2014 are still very much relevant today:
- Many manual and complex processes
- Varying discipline requirements
- Student’s special circumstances
- Managing accommodation and travel
- Managing facilitators/supervisors
- Increasing demand
- Decreasing supply
- Complex information management
You can all relate to at least one of these issues!
Working on current education placement improvement projects highlighted a gap where teams could share issues, risks, and find best practice amongst each other across the sector. NAFEA provides one avenue for this, but we thought a Community of Practice (CoP) could also be useful for staff from any and all universities.
Last month we hosted our first Placements & WIL Community of Practice (CoP) with a resounding response from the sector. We facilitated the hour-long discussion focussing on each university representative stating their current situation, challenges and frustrations.
Unsurprisingly, the common challenges were highlighted as:
- insufficient supervisors
- placement staff turnover
- increasing student numbers causing greater pressures on supply
- leading days
- unpaid placements
- advanced standing
Feedback from representatives came through clearly – that the sharing of these pain points and frustrations, as well as the learning from how other institutions have solved some of these was something that could be taken back to help address these challenges. We will be hosting more of these on a regular basis.
The next CoP is scheduled for early 2025 with a focus on health placements
Additional discipline focuses will be scheduled based on attendee interest.
If you are interested in attending any CoPs or to register interest for your specific discipline please contact Dianne van Eck on 0412 417774 or dianne.vaneck@dvesolutions.com.au.
