East of England Clinical Learning Environment Strategy

The Clinical Learning Environment (CLE) Strategy for the East of England provides structure, direction and ambition to enhance the quality of CLEs for all learners. The strategy focusses on the CLE for non-medical programmes with clear commonalities, including for nursing, midwifery and allied health. It is expected that this strategy will also positively impact on learners undertaking a wide range of learning, including medical programmes and where possible collaboration between medical and non-medical structures and learners will be supported. This encompasses all vocational, undergraduate, apprenticeship, post graduate and continuing professional development programmes which incorporate learning in clinical practice. It is recognised that practice learning takes place in an increasingly broad range of settings; with the focus of this document learning in clinical settings in health and social care as aligned to the four pillars of practice (HEE 2017). However, it is expected that the implementation of this strategy will have a positive impact across all practice learning environments. The intention for the strategy is to enable the region to create dynamic, innovative, compassionate and inclusive CLEs that will shape and grow the future health and care workforce for the region.

This strategy provides a long term and strategic approach to meet the needs of learners, educators, supervisors and clinical teams, creating a sustainable culture of learning through capitalising on existing resources and leveraging partnerships to ensure HEE quality standards (HEE 2021) for education are consistently achieved together with those of Professional Statutory and Regulatory bodies, including the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC).