While around 40 to 60 per cent of new physiotherapy graduates gain employment in private practice, only a small proportion of them receive private practice placements before they graduate.

Trying to understand what factors determine a high-quality placement—as well as identify the tools and resources required by clinic owners to provide these placements—will be the focus of the 2023 Pat Cosh Trust Strategic Grant, the first of its kind.

Dr Casey Peiris is an associate professor of physiotherapy at La Trobe University and the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Her project, titled ‘SPaRKLE—Supporting Private practitioners with co-designed Resources and Knowledge to increase student access to high quality Learning Experiences’, is a collaboration between researchers, universities, private practitioners and physiotherapy students from across Australia.

The impetus for the research was the lack of knowledge surrounding experiences of private placements in Australia.

‘We were working to increase the provision of them, but we didn’t really know what the situation was like across the country,’ says Casey.

‘Many students want a private practice placement, but they come back from it with differing views on what they think went well or didn’t go well, to the point where we would get wildly different feedback even on the same placement with the same supervisors.

'Whereas in hospitals, they have supervised students for many years and have a lot of internal support, structure and a culture of supervision.

Dr Casey Peiris

'They just know what to do.

'Conversely, private practitioners have told us that they need more support to deliver quality placements.’

The research will focus on two questions.

What factors contribute to high-quality clinical placement experiences from the perspective of students, graduates, universities and private practitioners?

And how can we best support private practitioners to deliver high-quality learning experiences during clinical placements?

The study will utilise a mixed-methods, co-design style and will explore these questions in two steps.

‘The first part will comprise surveys and focus group interviews to help us understand what exactly is a high-quality private practice placement experience,’ says Casey.

‘This isn’t well defined in the literature, so it might actually mean very different things to private practitioners, students and universities.’

‘We’ll then take the information from the surveys and focus groups and combine it with previous research on the benefits, barriers and facilitators to private practice and bring it all together into co-design workshops,’ says Casey.

‘There are a number of universities involved as we thought it would be really important to band together and produce some high-quality resources rather than relying on each university to cobble something together.

'If we can accomplish this on a bigger scale, then everyone can use it to help our private practitioners to host students, which would benefit many different stakeholders.’

The Pat Cosh Trust Strategic Grant will impart many benefits to Casey’s research.

‘With the Pat Cosh funding we’ll be able to hire an experienced co-design workshop facilitator, which means we can comprehensively compile insights from all our key stakeholders to guide the design of our resource,’ says Casey.

‘We’ll also be able to pay our practitioners to participate, because we understand that it’s hard to engage busy private practitioners in research.’

It’s also an opportunity to carry on the work of the grant’s namesake.

‘Pat Cosh worked in private practice and was very big on physiotherapy education,’ says Casey.

‘She was a real pioneer of physiotherapy in Australia and she did so much in her time.

'Looking back at her career, I hope this project would have made her proud and will honour her legacy.’

Recruitment now underway

Recruitment for the project is now open. The research team is inviting physiotherapy students, private practitioners and recent graduates working in private practice to take part in a national survey exploring private practice placements. 

Your insights will directly inform the development of co-designed resources to support high-quality learning experiences in private settings. 

Two surveys are available: one for students; and one for private practitioners (including new graduates). 

If you're a student or private practitioner involved in physiotherapy education or placement supervision in any way, we’d love to hear from you. 

Your input will help shape the future of student placements in Australia.

By contributing, you'll be helping to ensure that new graduates are better prepared and more work-ready when they enter private practice.

Student survey link (here)

Private practice survey link (here)