How to harness education fellows to optimise clinical placement capacity

There is a global need to increase our medical workforce to meet the demands of changing population demography and increased complex comorbidity. Recruitment to medicine, nursing and other healthcare professions must significantly increase [1]; however, clinical placement saturation is becoming a rate-limiting step to substantial increase in student numbers. This article will consider how clinical placement providers can deploy education fellows (EFs) to innovatively create capacity whilst enhancing undergraduate clinical placement quality. Clinical teaching fellows are increasingly becoming pivotal players in supporting delivery of undergraduate clinical education and promoting student experience. Unlike clinical teaching fellows, EFs do not have clinical commitments and can reliably coordinate, create and deliver diverse undergraduate learning, mentoring and assessment activity, alleviating senior clinical staff of competing educational responsibilities. We propose that integrated EF-led innovation can facilitate more consistent, high-quality placement learning whilst growing placement capacity, without compromising patient care. This article focuses on educational interventions within hospital clinical placements for students from a range of healthcare disciplines including medicine, nursing and allied healthcare professions. The change in workforce requirements and consequent need for a greater undergraduate capacity should catalyse wider discussion around the structure of healthcare education and philosophies of placement development. The authors' experience is in medical education; however, the principles are widely applicable to all healthcare professions for whom experiential placement learning is a necessary training component. Reimagining and restructuring of placement experiences will support healthcare faculty, universities and regulators in supporting sustainable health workforce expansion and equitable healthcare access for all.