Practice supervisors provide learning experiences for nursing and midwifery students within the practice learning environment.
Learning experiences could include:
- providing and facilitating opportunities for students to practise skills
- sharing knowledge with the student and effectively demonstrating how to put that knowledge into practice safely
- observing students
- giving constructive feedback on student performance
- empowering students to take advantage of available resources and learning opportunities
- delegating learning opportunities to other practice supervisors and anyone else who may suitably enable learning
- providing opportunities for students to learn ‘independently’ by enabling students to practise their skills with minimal or indirect supervision, at the same time maintaining patient safety
- empowering students to take responsibility for their own learning by helping them self assess and reflect, identifying areas of strengths and improvements.
The intended outcomes and a clear leaning plan from an experience is more important that the length of the practice learning experience. A learning experience does not have to be long in order to be valuable or worthwhile, or to deliver required learning outcomes. That should be the consideration made by the AEI and its practice learning partners when deciding whether a learning experience is ‘suitable’ or not.
