Introduction

LEARNING IN AND THROUGH PRACTICE LIES AT THE HEART OF clinician education. Advances in clinical knowledge and transformations in the contexts of clinical practice have made visible the complexities and challenges of this learning. These advances have rendered the wider professional education of which it forms a part increasingly provisional. In tandem, the search for deeper understandings of what it actually means to learn and to teach in clinical settings has intensified. Work-based learning (WBL) is a field recently come of age and now maturing as it elaborates its distinctive conceptual and theoretical lenses through collaborative relationships with researchers in a range of professions. The Researching Learning for Clinical Practice Group had its origins in the WLE Centre (Centre for Excellence in Work-based Learning for Education Professionals), which I was privileged to co-direct between 2004 and 2009. In this context, the Researching Learning for Clinical Practice Group has been one of the most enterprising and critically engaged groups with which I have had the privilege to work. The group brought together educational researchers, academics and practitioners from a wide range of clinical and mainstream education institutions that share an interest in the learning of practitioners in workplace settings. It grew to include a wide group of approximately 150 medical education practitioners in undergraduate and postgraduate contexts, working with professionals involved in diagnosis, therapy, prevention, health promotion, rehabilitation and/or management of care. These include medical doctors, nurses, midwives, physiotherapists, speech therapists, health visitors and radiographers. This book is one product of the rich interactions generated in and through that network, a 2response to the growing demand from regulators, educators, clinicians and students for conceptual and methodological tools that can help to develop learning in professional healthcare contexts. Setting the scene in this introduction is both an honour and a challenge.