Undergraduate Placements

Problem Statement

CM Health offers around 2500 clinical placements to students from medicine, nursing, midwifery, allied health, and scientific and technical tertiary education programmes.

What are we trying to achieve?

Since 2009, CM Health has used Dedicated Education Units (DEU) as the preferred model for hosting clinical placements for nursing students. In 2015, we established the first interprofessional DEU in perioperative care. The unit supports nursing and fourth year medical students.

Since then, we have established another interprofessional DEU in the KidzFirst inpatient wards, which supports nursing and fifth year medical students.

CM Health acknowledges the benefits of the DEU model in supporting undergraduate students and is promoting it as the preferred model for hosting student clinical placements across the organisation.

We are also committed to growing a workforce and appreciate that a locally grown workforce, representative of our community is the most ideal. Providing optimal clinical experiences will support the development of a fit for purpose workforce and will hopefully make Counties Manukau a preferred employer post qualification.

What have we done?

The DEU governance group is made up of representatives from across CM Health and the various professions, as well as the regional tertiary education providers who place their students at CM Health. The group works collaboratively to plan and implement further DEUs within the CM Health.

In addition, we continue to provide Healthy Together (interprofessional education) workshops for healthcare students, with 120 students from four tertiary institutes and a variety of professional groups taking part in 2018. The focus of the workshops is on role clarification, team functioning and team communication.

Where to from here?

There are currently two new DEUs in the pipeline for Semester 1, 2020. By increasing the number of DEU’s in the organisation, we increase our capacity for student placements we can host. Therefore providing more opportunity for students to come to Counties Manukau health and additionally more candidates for our future workforce.