The Private Practice Toolkit is up and running! Presently 65% of our graduates are working full or part time in private practices scattered around the province. We don’t have enough clinical placement opportunities in this area of practice to meet student demand. You will find the toolkit both on our UBC website as well as PABC’s (big thanks to PABC for helping to advertise this as well as hosting it on their website). To date the toolkit has had over 400 hits through our various sites.
The module is interactive and provides solutions to perceived barriers (day to day caseload management, an outline of academic exposure students will have undergone prior to arriving on placement, how the role as a mentor will evolve over a placement). Also available are resources about the UBC Curriculum, how to assess a student, placement category types, and how to become a clinical educator. We encourage our private practitioners to have a review of the module as it may help to alleviate their concerns. This module is hosted alongside our other EXCEL modules which are a great resource during student placements.
If you want to read firsthand from private practitioners about taking on students see this issue’s contributions from Alumni members Maegan Mak and Gilbert Park.
Additionally, we would also like to encourage all clinical educators to apply for clinical faculty status (https://physicaltherapy.med.ubc.ca/clinical-education/how-to-become-a-ubc-clinical-faculty-member/). This will allow you access to UBC considerable online library. We are hoping that between the toolkit and clinical faculty status, we will be able to recruit more sites and educators who are willing to pay it forward to the future. If you have any feedback on “the Toolkit”, please let Carolyn Andersson (carolyn.andersson@ubc.ca) or myself (anne.rankin@ubc.ca) know.