Opening up student placements in private physio providers

Recently the CSP, along with NHS England and the Royal College of Occupational Therapists (RCOT), hosted a group of representatives of private healthcare providers to explore the benefits and challenges to their companies supporting more pre-registration allied health professional students.

It’s clear there is already great work going on to achieve this aim and a real appetite to support students on placement. It benefits recruitment and feels like ‘it is the right thing to do’. We all participate in educating the next generation of allied health professionals. 

Yet there are barriers to taking students in private practice, with the main one being the restrictions placed on private health providers by private medical insurance companies, which can stipulate how long a professional must have been practicing to treat their patient.

This causes a challenge for staff working in a private setting to know how much they can let the students participate in a person’s treatment without being in breach of their healthcare provider contract and gives them the feeling that they cannot offer a valuable placement for a student. It was great to discuss placements across the four pillars of practice and highlight the benefits of offering non-clinical placements. 

Looking ahead, the CSP will continue to collaborate with NHS England, RCOT, and independent health care providers to start to address some of the barriers and find ways to enable more student placements to occur within the private and voluntary sector.