Beyond 'spray on' professional development: Enhancing supervision in a tertiary teaching hospital

Short 'programmes' of professional development can have limited impact on clinical supervisors' practices. This paper reports on an innovative programme of professional development, implemented in a tertiary teaching hospital, that was designed to build clinical supervision capacity, improve the educational practice of frontline clinical supervisors and cultivate future educational leaders.

The programme was a partnership venture between St. Vincent's Hospital Melbourne and the University of Melbourne. It has a three-tiered tapered design: a foundational self-paced online course; online, interprofessional learning communities; and a Graduate Certificate in Clinical Education. Participants progressed from one tier to the next, with the largest number of employees participating in the primary tier (N = 112).

We adopted a utilisation-focused approach to evaluation, collecting multiple data sets across the tiers. Participants reported greater consciousness of their teaching practices, made changes to their practice, and the interprofessional learning communities allowed better integration of practical knowledge with the formal knowledge from the foundational course. Systemic outcomes included the creation of informal educator networks and the diffusion of ideas and practices within the hospital.

Managers and clinical education leaders at the hospital concluded that funding this programme of professional development provided significant benefits, with a high return on investment, which may be transferable to other health care settings that place value on clinical education. For the outcomes to be sustainable, an ongoing programme of professional development needs to be built into the institution's fabric so that the resultant supervisory practices become strongly embedded in the organisational culture.