To recruit and retain quality rural and remote health professionals, we need to support them with quality clinical supervision at work. In the Northern Territory, face-to-face professional development is limited, and turnover of health professionals remains high.
Since 2012, the NT Flinders University Department of Rural Health (NT UDRH) has offered clinical supervision workshops to health professionals of all disciplines who supervise learners in the workplace. Historically, training has been run out of Darwin by a team of two academics and one professional staff member.
We had a problem. It was a good problem! But a problem nonetheless… the workshops became popular! We’ve even had several participants drive over 300km each way just to attend. As awareness and popularity of the NT UDRH clinical supervision workshops grew, capacity to deliver became more challenging and the costs involved continued to rise. We wanted to ensure we could meet the needs of supervisors over a massive geographical area.
In addition to our popularity problem, our educational videos didn’t represent the diverse people of the NT, and staff based in campuses outside of Darwin weren’t skilled up to plan and/or facilitate the workshop.
We started by securing some funding to update our video content. We were then able to include local actors representative of the NT context and gender, cultural and role diversity. All new videos include closed captioning and signposting to support participants with different learning needs and preferences.
We reduced the cognitive load for our participants by increasing visual learning modalities whilst reducing unnecessary text and medical jargon. We had a website developed to provide information and simplify registration for participants. We boosted our educational value for workshop participants by offering workshop participants the option of gaining recognition of prior learning from the two-day workshop towards a graduate certificate in clinical education.
Improvements were also made to benefit other NT academics and professional staff involved in facilitation and delivery of the workshop. This resulted in accessible training, step-by step user-friendly guides, standardised PowerPoints, standardised timetables and mechanisms for peer evaluation of teaching.
We implemented the intervention at the beginning of 2024. By the end of 2024, we delivered eight workshops to 171 participants across Darwin, Nhulunbuy, Katherine, Tennant Creek, and Alice Springs. This represents a 66% increase in participant numbers from the previous year.
In 2025, we’ve delivered nine workshops across the NT and delivered the workshop to over 200 participants. Two workshop participants have now taken the streamlined pathway to enrol in a postgraduate course in clinical education with Flinders University, and we’re expecting more. In most cases in both 2024 and 2025, local academic and professional staff were able to deliver the workshops unaided or via online support. Four new staff members were able to join the teaching team and deliver the content locally. Facilitators are now from diverse professional backgrounds which match our target audience more closely, with facilitators having backgrounds in speech pathology, pharmacy, nutrition and dietetics, physiotherapy, nursing, midwifery, and medicine.
The ability to run the workshops in our more remote sites has increased as we are able to utilise more local staff as facilitators and avoid excessive travel and accommodation costs. Having dates set in advance for each site has allowed better marketing, planning and participant attendance.
Alongside these improvements, we are also currently following up several 2024 workshop participants to explore the translation of their workshop learning to health workplaces. We are hoping to publish our study results soon – watch this space!
We’re glad to contribute to quality clinical supervision practices in NT health workplaces and can’t wait to see what future years bring!
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Excellent program and appreciated by all participants. Let’s hope this continues into the future with appropriate university funding.