Learning through health care work: premises, contributions and practices.

Abstract

Learning through work has long been important for the development of health care workers' occupational competence. However, to effectively utilise this mode of learning, its particular qualities and contributions need to be understood and optimised and its limitations redressed. Optimising the experiences health care workplaces provide, augmenting their potential for learning and promoting workers' engagement with them can, together, improve workers' ability to respond to future occupational challenges. Importantly, such considerations can be used to understand and appraise workplaces as learning environments. Here, the concepts of practice curricula and pedagogies, and workers' personal epistemologies (i.e. what individuals know, can do and value) are described and advanced as practical bases for optimising learning in and for health care workplaces now and for the future. Such bases seem salient given the growing emphasis on practice-based provisions for the initial preparation and on-going professional development of health care workers' capacities to be effective in their practice, and responsive to occupational innovations that need to be generated and enacted through practice.