Problems of Clinical Education From the Viewpoints of the Physiotherapy Students in Iran Universities

Evaluating the educational programs in various Medical Science disciplines is a highly sensitive matter and of great importance. Physiotherapy (PT) is an important field of Rehabilitation Sciences, which requires distinguished scientific and professional skills. One of the practical ways to assess the quality of clinical education in PT is to study the students’ perspective in this field, because they are the main target audience for education. Therefore, this study was conducted to determine the problems in clinical training of PT students, from the medical students’ perspective, in different universities of Tehran City.
The present study was conducted using a qualitative content analysis approach, through individual interviews with 13 PT undergraduate students in Tehran. They were recruited through targeted sampling with maximum variation.
After analyzing the obtained data, a total of 4 themes were derived, which included characteristics of clinical supervision, training schedules and training, setting of clinical training, and general characteristics of the learners. Furthermore, 22 subthemes were obtained; some of them included lack of clinical teaching experience among the faculty members, no supervision in clinical teaching, for example, theory and clinical courses being held in one day, short duration of clinical teaching, inappropriate facilities, and the disorganisation and laziness of some students.
Perhaps changing the clinical teaching methods, employing experienced and effective instructors, taking courses more seriously by students, establishing appropriate facilities for clinical training, supervision of the PT department over the performance of the teachers and the events during internships, and increasing the duration of theory and clinical courses, can all be effective in improving the quality of clinical training.