Practice educators

Find out more here about how to become a practice educator and how it can help with your own professional development.

Interest in being a practice educator normally develops through involvement with qualifying health professional students on placements and in supporting the learning of junior staff, engaging in peer learning with other professionals, carers or patients in the workplace.

Gaining experience

If you'd like to gain experience as a practice educator, have a preliminary discussion about possible options with your line manager and the link tutor of the higher education institution (HEI) that has placements in your service.

If you already find the practice educator role stimulating and rewarding you may like to extend your personal development by pursuing accredited status through the CSP's Accredited Clinical Educator (ACE) scheme.

Students on placement

All HEIs offer a range of ongoing activities to prepare, support and update all practice educators who offer placements to their students.

As all students have to successfully complete 1000 hours of supervised practice before qualifying there is a pressing need for all physiotherapists to facilitate student learning. In recognition of this, CSP Council agreed five key principles as a basis for good practice in practice-based learning, including that:

• clinical education is part of the responsibility and role of all clinical practitioners.
• anywhere a physiotherapist works is potentially suitable for a clinical education placement as a means of gaining a broad range of skills.

Continuing professional development

Most physiotherapists support others' learning in the workplace and increasingly enjoy the role as they discover how much its success contributes to their own continuing professional development (CPD).

In turn, practice educators influence learners' attitudes towards CPD. You can encourage your students to reflect on their practice, document their learning from placements and apply their learning into new practice experiences.

This will help to ensure they become competent practitioners and will embed this process of CPD into their practice and allow them to continue on as autonomous effective practitioners on qualification.

Charting the Future

We are currently working on a project, called Charting the Future, to prepare the physiotherapy profession for the future. This project will stimulate debate within the profession and with our stakeholders about the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for us all. And it will develop a shared understanding of how physiotherapy can and does contribute to the health and wellbeing of the UK population.

The final outcome of the project will be new resources and tools to support the profession.

Get involved yourself: see more information about Charting the Future on this website.