ABSTRACT
There is a consensus across all the professions in health and social care that students’ professional education should include practical experience of work with service users and patients. As we will see in the forthcoming chapters, the amount and nature of that practical experience varies from profession to profession. It is difficult to conceive of successful preparation for professional practice that is located solely in the classroom, as this site provides relatively limited opportunities to practise the application of skills and for skill development in real-life situations with actual patients or service users. This approach – live experience in the community or clinic – is fundamental to professionals and occupations that comprise practical or people skills along with intellectual ability: it is a model of learning that goes well beyond health and social care, and can be seen in the training for teachers, lawyers, architects and many others. The overviews of each of the professions in this book provide a graphic representation of the emphasis placed on this practical learning in the workplace, and it is the memories of these placements that students are most likely to take with them into their years of practice (Marsh and Triseliotis, 1996).
