Miss Jaime Jenkinson1, Ms Jess Sudholz1, Mr Ian Davey1
1Eastern Health, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Ian is a Senior Occupational Therapist Clinical Educator at Eastern Health, with over 25 years’ experience in Mental Health, across community, inpatient, secure and correctional settings.
Jess is an Occupational Therapist Clinical Educator at Eastern Health, with over 13 years’ experience working in Mental Health, across community, inpatient, secure settings.
Abstract:
Intro/rationale:
Early career clinicians report transiting from student to clinician is a challenging time, when entering new teams with experienced colleagues, and are often reporting feelings of isolation and imposter syndrome. Clinical Educators in an early career mental health learner program aimed to intentionally address this challenge by implementing an end of session, pub-quiz style knowledge check to foster early career learners’ engagement in study day content, and to create long standing work relationships across allied health disciplines.
Objectives:
Employ non-traditional ways of learning and knowledge testing to support early career mental health clinicians in forming career long professional relationships, and a sense of belonging.
Method / Approach:
Inclusion of a pub-quiz style knowledge check to both foster early career learners’ engagement in formal learning content and build life professional relationships with their peers. Learners were allocated a team during orientation, disciplines were intentionally mixed to deter professions from sticking together, and they remained in these teams for the duration of their learner program.
Results / practice implications:
Stronger collaborative relationships amongst peers. Shared responsibility of self-care and well-being. Greater knowledge retention of formal study day content. A deeper sense of belonging and connection to the wider mental health program, and to allied health as a cohort.
Conclusion:
Including non-traditional methods of learning, and knowledge checking into learner programs not only improves knowledge retention, but it also promotes teamwork, self-care, resilience in early career mental health clinicians.