Turning to ‘the human story’ as the longitudinal integrator of learning

Clinical learning in the longitudinal integrated curriculum (LIC) is distributed across multiple settings, supervisors and healthcare contexts. In the original program model, the GP-based primary supervisor worked and taught across hospital, community and general practice - effectively, embodying a human integrative mechanism for learning within the LIC. In the new model, which splits the clinical placement across the government and private sectors, this integrative mechanism is missing. As such, a suitable new integrator of learning is called for.

On closer inspection we can see that this integrative mechanism is already in place - in the form of the patient’s personal experience of health and illness, which necessarily cuts across systems and through time, with all its richness and unpredictably intact.

All we need to do is grant human experience the authority to teach us wherever we find it, and to follow wherever it leads.