This book aims to assist clinical teachers in the practice of clinical teaching. It assumes that clinical teachers will bring to their task a background knowledge of educational principles, experience in a clinical nursing field, knowledge of substantive nursing content, a love of teaching and a desire to share with their students the joys, tears, challenge and wonder of learning in the clinical setting. The format is designed around a set of commonly encountered problems and encourages readers, whether on the threshold of a career as a clinical teacher or those who are experienced, to think through their responses to the problem situation before reading on to a disclosure of possible courses of action. In brief, the book is a companion to Teaching Nursing: A Self Instructional Handbook (Ewan and White, 1984). The authors'' interest in clinical teaching can be traced through a number of years in a variety of teaching careers with multidisciplinary health professional groups, of whom nurses comprise the majority of practitioners. As senior lecturers in the School of Medical Education, the authors were involved in developing and teaching a Master of Health Personnel Education Degree course; the students (or Fellows) in that programme were all graduates from a broad range of health care disciplines - nursing, medicine, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, nutrition, dentistry, health education, health resources management, radiography, social work, community development, occupational safety and health.
