Best Practice Clinical Learning Environment (BPCLE) Framework

The BPCLE Framework is a guide for health and human services organisations, in partnership with education providers, to coordinate and deliver high-quality training for learners.

The BPCLE Framework was developed to ensure positive education cultures are created and maintained and to help organisations improve the student experience through strategies and mechanisms that monitor the quality of the education environment.

The framework identifies 6 key characteristics of high-performing learning environments:

1. An organisational culture that values learning.
2. Best practice clinical practice
3. A positive learning environment
4. An effective health service – education provider relationship
5. Effective communication processes
6. Appropriate resources and facilities.

Implementation benefits

Ensuring consistently high-quality education opportunities across Victoria’s health and human services sector is essential to enhancing training capacity and making sure a skilled and competent workforce is developed.

Implementation of the BPCLE Framework is expected to bring direct benefits to organisations including:

• improvements to the learning environment, resulting in better experiences for all learners and for staff involved in delivering education and training
• efficiencies and improvements in educational activities and processes, resulting in less wasted effort by staff
• better relationships between organisations and their education provider partners, resulting in more support for staff and improved teaching programs that produce work-ready graduates
• enhancements of the organisational learning culture, contributing to improved patient care and health outcomes
• organisational learning across and within health and human services professions, leading to better relationships between disciplines and between staff
• evidence-based accountability for, and transparency of, training activity and investment.

Project background

BPCLE Framework

The BPCLE Framework was first developed in 2008, based on data collected from health services, education providers, and learners across seven disciplines (medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, podiatry, social work, speech pathology and occupational therapy). The BPCLE Framework has subsequently progressed through a number of phases to build upon the initial foundation and create useful stakeholder resources to assist with implementation:

Framework development: A literature review and stakeholder consultation was used to identify the key elements of a best practice clinical learning environment, and the potential indicators to facilitate monitoring of these elements.

Framework validation: The BPCLE Framework was validated with additional health disciplines and clinical training settings to ensure the elements and indicators are relevant in all clinical placement environments. This stage also aimed to validate potential indicators with a view to refining these throughout the implementation process.

Resource development: A suite of practical resources was developed using existing resources provided by the sector and through further examination of the available literature.

BPCLE – Performance Monitoring Framework

The BPCLE Performance Monitoring Framework was developed to define each indicator within the BPCLE Framework to help stakeholders meaningfully measure and monitor the quality of education and training.

Piloting the BPCLE Framework

Selected clinical placement providers across different settings and organisational types piloted implementation of the BPCLE Framework to test the tools and inform its broader rollout. The pilot demonstrated that implementation is achievable on a whole-of-organisation basis, in a range of settings, and in a relatively short space of time using the tools developed specifically to support the process.

Changes to the BPCLE Indicators

One of the recommendations of the review was that the department cease the use of the current BPCLE tool and replace it with a simpler data collection mechanism that maintains compliance with the BPLCE framework. The 55 BPCLE Indicators will be replaced with 24 simplified measures.

The Update to the Best Practice Clinical Learning Environment 2023 has the new measures that will be collected through the BPCLE project. To give health services time to adjust any internal reporting needs the initial collection of these measures due in February 2024 will only include the following measures for the 2023 period.

• 3(e) Learners felt safe at this organisation.
• 3(f) Learners had an overall sense of wellbeing while in this organisation.
• 3(g) Learners personally experienced bullying in this organisation.

The department will advise of a collection tool for the 2025 collection that will include all measures.