Evaluation of Victoria's Strategic Plan for Clinical Placements

The Victorian Clinical Training Council (VCTC; formerly the Victorian Clinical Placements Council, VCPC) was established to provide strategic leadership and advice on professional-entry student clinical placements in Victoria. The VCTC’s first strategic plan – Well Placed. Well Prepared – sets out an ambitious program for development centred on four strategic priorities: support innovation; enhance capacity; ensure and improve quality; and, strengthen governance. These strategic priorities are enabled through data and information and funding support.

Well Placed. Well Prepared was developed as a four-year plan for the period 2012 – 2015. To assess the effectiveness of the plan's implementation and the success of the plan against its objectives, an evaluation framework was developed, incorporating appropriate performance indicators.

The evaluation framework is intended to assist in the following:

• Evaluating the mid-term progress against the plan in late 2013.
• Evaluating the overall success upon cessation of the plan in 2015.
• Identifying and attaining efficiencies in operation of constituent elements of the plan.
• Producing a more coherent and coordinated environment for the planning of quality clinical placements in Victoria.

The project involved a range of stakeholder consultations to inform the development of indicators and other aspects of the evaluation methodology. A total of 88 performance indicators were identified, 49 of which were flagged as high priority for inclusion in the mid-term and end-of-term evaluation processes.

In mid-2013, darcy associates was contracted to undertake the mid-term evaluation on behalf of the Department of Health and the VCTC. Data collection invoved surveys of stakeholders from across the Victorian clincial placements system, organisational reports (mainly from education providers and clinical placement providers) and extraction of data from departmental data sets. An indicator results report was released in late January 2014 and this was followed by a report on the conduct of the mid-term evaluation in 2013-14, including recommendations for the end-of-term evaluation that was conducted in 2015.