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Background Clinical supervision in general practice is critical for enabling registrars (GP trainees) to provide safe medical care, develop skills and enjoy primary care careers. However, this largely depends on the quality of supervision provided. There has been limited research describing what encompasses quality within GP clinical supervision, making it difficult to promote best practice. This study aimed to explore the attributes of high-quality clinical supervision for GP registrars. Methods In 2019–20, 22 semi-structured interviews were conducted with GP supervisors who were peer-nominated as best practice supervisors, by Regional GP Training Organisations and GP Colleges in Australia. Purposeful sampling sought respondents with diverse characteristics including gender and career stage, practice size, state/territory and rurality. Interviews were conducted by video-consultation and recorded. De-identified transcripts were independently coded using iterative, inductive thematic analyses to derive themes that reflected quality in GP supervision. Results Seven themes emerged. Participants understood the meaning of quality supervision based on their experience of being supervised when they were a registrar, and from reflecting and learning from other supervisors and their own supervision experiences. Quality was reflected by actively structuring GP placements to optimise all possible learning opportunities, building a secure and caring relationship with registrars as the basis for handling challenging situations such as registrar mistakes. Quality also encompassed sustaining and enhancing registrar learning by drawing on the input of the whole practice team who had different skills and supervision approaches. Strong learner-centred approaches were used, where supervisors adjusted support and intervention in real-time, as registrar competence emerged in different areas. Quality also involved building the registrar’s professional identity and capabilities for safe and independent decision-making and encouraging registrars to reflect on situations before giving quality feedback, to drive learning. Conclusions This study, although exploratory, provides a foundation for understanding the quality of clinical supervision in general practice, from the perspective of peer-recognised GP supervisors. Understanding and adopting quality within GP supervision may be improved by GPs sharing exemplars of best practice and having opportunities for professional reflection. The findings could be used as a point of reference for devising GP supervisor curriculum, resources and professional development activities.

Clinical education/training is increasingly being expanded to community general practice settings (primary care clinics led by doctors). This plays an important role in developing a skilled “primary-care ready” workforce. However, there is limited information to guide the implementation of high-quality learning environments suitable for the range of general practices and clinical learners they oversee. We aimed to develop a consensus-based framework to address this. A co-design participatory action research method involved working with stakeholders to agree a project plan, collect and interpret data and endorse a final framework. As a starting point, an initial draft framework was adapted from an existing framework, the Best Practice Clinical Learning Environment (BPCLE) Framework. We gathered feedback about this from a national GP Supervisor Liaison Officer Network (SLON) (experienced GP clinical supervisors) during a 90-minute face-to-face focus group. They rated their agreement with the relevance of objectives and elements, advising on clear terminology and rationale for including/excluding various components. The resulting framework was refined and re-tested with the SLON and wider GP educational stakeholders until a final graphically designed version was endorsed. The resulting “GP Clinical Learning Environment” (GPCLE) Framework is applicable for planning and benchmarking best practice learning environments in general practice.

People use reflection and reflective practice for many different reasons, including for self-care and to make sense of their experiences. In this study, social workers spoke about how they learned to be reflective, with many participants describing activities in their childhood that developed their reflective capacity. The aim of this article is to apply these ideas and examine the factors that enhance reflective capacity in children and young people. This research was part of a PhD study that involved interviews with 35 social workers in USA, Canada, UK and Australia. This exploratory study found that activities like story reading and asking children to reflect on their behaviour are early steps in the process of becoming reflective, but this needs to be followed up with conversations that deconstruct assumptions to make sense of experiences and explore multiple perspectives. This research is important for health and human service workers and others who want to develop reflective capacity in children and young people, particularly for children subject to disadvantage who need to overcome trauma and adversities.

This article explores the process of combining narrative inquiry and critical reflection as research methodology. Qualitative researchers use narrative approaches to explore the stories of participants and to understand the ways these stories were constructed and positioned. Critical reflection provides a framework for deconstructing the stories and exploring assumptions about knowledge, power and reflexivity. In this PhD research, the narrative approach was underpinned by, and combined with, a critically reflective research approach. As these approaches were amalgamated, the critical narrativist emerged. Principles of critical reflection and narrative scholarship can be intertwined; however, the separate threads may be conceptually and practically separated. This article describes how these modes of inquiry came together and discusses the implicit and explicit nature of the methodological positions. Finally, the author considers the opportunities for being more explicit about combining critical reflection with other research methodological approaches.

Community conversations are structured, inclusive conversations that bring together a group of people to engage in meaningful conversation, share knowledge and ideas, and discuss solutions to complex problems. This article focuses on the methodological aspects of using community conversations as a research approach. Participants included paramedics, ambulance service managers, paramedicine students and paramedicine educators, who gathered at La Trobe University in Bendigo in February 2013 to attend a conference titled ‘Paramedic Education and Leadership. Conversations took place over three days, with participants spending around five hours discussing the key issues related to paramedicine student clinical placements. Three stages of community conversations are described, along with the participants’ evaluation of the process, leading to the conclusion that community conversations are a valuable and effective way to bring together groups of people to discuss ideas and solutions to complex social problems.

In this paper, I explore reflective practice literature and the elements of critical reflection, and I reflect on my experiences of learning and using a critical reflection approach to better understand a significant incident. This reflective paper is written from my personal perspective as a social worker using Fook and Gardner’s model of critical reflection to provide a framework to reflect, explore and learn from my own experiences. The Fook and Gardner approach to critical reflection encourages deconstruction and analysis of a personal or professional experience to understand the different assumptions, relationships and influences embedded within it and how it affects our practice. As new understandings emerge, the individual is able to reconstruct this incident and develop new techniques to deal with a similar incident in the future.