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What is our goal?

The Enhancing Clinical Learning in the Workplace (ECLW) Project is a collaborative venture between four schools across two universities. We share the common aim of identifying best practice in the use of the clinical workplace as a learning environment. Our goal is to disseminate that information among educators and professional bodies in the healthcare sector, and across UK and international vocational education, with a view to enhancing this key component of the undergraduate experience.

Why are we doing this work?

Learning in the workplace is a fundamental component of vocational undergraduate courses. Contact with real situations is a unique opportunity for learning, although developing and supporting the educational experience alongside the demands of the workplace can be a challenge. This project is primarily set in the context of the veterinary workplace, but deals with concepts applicable across the education of vocational professionals. The challenge to professional educators is to ensure that students gain maximum benefit from the workplace both when they are there, and when material from the workplace is used to enrich other learning activities. Clinicians must be able to integrate physical skills, communication skills and an understanding of disease processes with wider aspects such as ethical, legal, and economic factors. This process of integration must happen in a reasoning framework that forms a plan for successful patient outcome

Why vets?

Core to the project are two veterinary Schools, at London (Royal Veterinary College) and Nottingham (School of Veterinary Medicine and Science). Our common goal of producing graduates within a modern competency framework, fit to practise veterinary medicine in the UK, coupled with the variety of methods of workplace learning, offers unique opportunity for ground breaking educational research and development, aimed at the critical issues in professional workplace learning.
The ECLW project will provide evidence regarding the value of components of clinical workplace learning, from delivery through to assessment in a variety of contexts.

What do we want to know?

Three of the main questions we will be seeking to answer are:

• How does workplace learning facilitate the students’ development towards becoming a successful clinician?
• How may workplace learning best support lifelong learning?
• How does prior experience, personality and learning style influence workplace learning?

Who will be involved?

In order to collect a good evidence base the ECLW project team will be working with students and qualified professionals across a spectrum of clinical disciplines to assist with this investigation. These stakeholders will also play a critical role in championing the dissemination of deliverables towards best practice.

For further details about the project, please contact us.