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AHP students in public health settings - Toolkit 2: students
As part of your course, you may have the ability to source a placement opportunity and this should be checked and discussed with your education institution.
Back to Supporting the Development of Placements for Allied Health Professional Students in Public Health Settings
Toolkit 2: Allied Health Profession students
This toolkit aimed at students includes the following sections and accompanying checklists, templates and ideas to help support and guide you.
- Finding public health placements
- Setting up public health placements
- Learning areas
- Establishing what the students will do
- Supporting and supervising students
- Assessing students
Download Toolkit 2: Allied Health Profession students
Top tips for student Allied Health Professionals from the case study authors
- Take as many different types of placement opportunities as possible, even if these can only be insight days, and embrace many different ways of working.
- Be prepared and review your own skills before undertaking the placement as well as during and after which helps to show how much you have learnt.
- Be committed to understand what a public health perspective is asking of you.
- Keep an open mind to opportunities.
- Try to understand the population and their complexity of need; shift your perspective to working with complexity not conditions.
- Aim to look under the bonnet of everything, understanding reality and how it connects with theoretical ideal world scenarios.
- Ask as many questions as possible and put yourself forward.
- Clinical skills are just one part of what you do; administration, communication, negotiation, being strategic, managing ‘team dynamics’, and how to facilitate change are all skills you need to thrive in a team and the wider system. These skills help to develop our identities and you should try to develop these in your placement experiences.
- The placements help to enhance your skills and so use these placements as an opportunity to have public health conversations and help behaviour change.
- Talk to everyone and try to make connections.
- Appreciate and understand the working practices of other Allied Health Professionals.
- Work across the Allied Health Professions to try and create a common dialogue to support the public health agenda.
- If you are running an event, try to do as much collaborative PR as possible to help attract people to events as well as casual passers-by.
- Consider what the local population’s needs are and the best time to hold an event to enable people to stop and talk.
- Acknowledge that you will be challenged professionally and personally but the benefits are worth the discomfort you might have.