Participants’ understandings of SLEs/WPBAs
| Understandings | Description | Illustrative quote |
|---|---|---|
| SLE/WPBA as unknown | Understanding unclear | “I didn't really understand what they [SLEs] meant ((laughs)) to be honest erm” (Female F1, site 3) |
| SLE/WPBA as summative tool | SLEs/WPBAs’ purpose is to assess trainees’ abilities, and give ‘pass/fail’ results | “WPBA is more of a case of they've performed a task and have they understood what that task is or is it something you can sign off that they're competent to do” (Male Trainer, site 3) |
| SLE/WPBA as tick box exercise | SLEs/WPBAs demonstrate basic requirements are met with little educational value | “It's still tempting for an assessor to say “I'm really busy, we'll do a WPBA and we'll just tick whether it was excellent or not”” (Female F2, site 1) |
| SLE/WPBA as safety net | SLEs/WPBAs’ purpose is to ensure that trainees who struggle are identified | “I initiated a Mini-CEX [Mini Clinical Evaluation Exercise] in a clinic to try and get some ideas about why the registrar was getting these complaints…what it allowed me to do was to try and broach the subject of the complaints with the registrar but in a training environment” (Male Trainer, site 2) |
| SLE as formative tool | SLEs are a tool for developing, rather than assessing, trainees | “It is a learning event and you should be giving them feedback on the process there and then, and that should be used as a learning tool” (Female Trainer, site 2) |
| SLE as a formalisation process | SLEs open up a legitimate route for trainees to ask seniors to engage in their learning, ensuring that training processes occur within the workplace | “I think that's just formalising what we do normally, ward round teaching it's formalising that but also making it more time consuming because you have to write it all down” (Female Trainer, site 1) |
| SLE as individual assessments | An opportunity to assess competencies and knowledge at a single time-point | “Problem is it's just, the supervised learning events is just a one off thing, it's just like a little snapshot” (Female F1, site 2) |
| SLE as formal progression | SLEs demonstrate trainee progression, evidencing skill acquisition over time | “My understanding of the SLEs are they are opportunities to um, view and um, assess a trainee's um, progress, whether that's examination skills, whether that's clinical reasoning… ” (Male Trainer, site 3) |
| SLE as developmental process | SLEs provide trainees with an opportunity for holistic development. Unlike ‘formal progression’, the focus is on trainees’ personal perceptions of development | “she [consultant] was there all the time, she, when she wasn't there, you know, the first thing she said to me when she got back onto the ward on Monday morning, was “What does the latest gas show? What are you gonna do…? Are you gonna treat this…?”, so, so the whole thing was just this massive learning experience” (Female F2, site 3) |
| SLE as engagement opportunity | SLEs are an opportunity for trainers and trainees to have one-to-one time that may not otherwise happen | “the fact it's compulsory…that gives you something you can say to seniors “look, I need to do this, I'm sorry, but I have to do it”…it does mean you sit down and hopefully spend half an hour talking in a bit more detail… it does mean you've got an excuse to have that face-to-face…” (Male F2, site 2) |
| WPBA as a gut feeling | WPBAs are poorly defined and therefore assessing whether a trainee had passed is a ‘judgement call’ | “because also like last year, somebody would give you all these meets or meets it more, but it's such a subjective thing” (Female F2, site 1) |
| Understandings linked with emotion | Understandings articulated with emotion talk | “I think it's six of one half-dozen of the other, I am not somebody who excels at that kind of assessment… errm and I get very anxious, I get very uptight and I don't shine… and it feeds into all my anxieties and insecurities about myself… and I think that probably skews my perception of them [SLE/WPBAs]…” (Female F2, site 3) |
Mini-CEX, Mini Clinical Evaluation Exercise; SLEs, supervised learning events; WPBAs, workplace-based assessments.