Marcus Gardner’s passion for supporting allied health clinicians brought him back to the books.
More than 20 years after his last foray into formal education, Marcus began his PhD which focused on clinical supervision for allied health professionals.
“Having managed allied health education and undergraduate student placements for several years, I’ve become very passionate about how we can support the development of our allied health workforce,” he said.
“It’s important we support the learning and development of our new staff so they can continue to provide excellent care to the community, but we also need to ensure our existing staff are well supported and don’t burn out. That was the main reason behind the decision to do a PhD.”
In the early stages of his career at Bendigo Health, Marcus was inspired by a manager who was interested in research and reinforcing the importance of evidence-based practice in allied health.
“When I moved into a leadership role, I started to see we could do things better, especially in the space of clinical supervision. I could see some disciplines were doing it well, so I became interested in how we could lift the standard across allied health,” he said.
Eight years of research later, Marcus is well on the way to achieving that goal of optimising clinical supervision for allied health.
His thesis, ‘Implementing Clinical Supervision for Allied Health Professionals’, addressed the inconsistent approaches to clinical supervision with a framework of common processes and standards.
During his research, Marcus primarily worked on developing an organisational allied health clinical supervision protocol, with a focus on group supervision.
“This hadn’t been done at Bendigo Health before, which meant some of our staff and managers couldn’t access supervision,” Marcus said.
“We also developed a complementary training program. We often assume clinicians should know how to undertake supervision, but they’re trained to be clinicians, not supervisors or teachers. It was really important to bridge that gap.”
Successfully implementing the protocol at Bendigo Health soon led to a bigger opportunity for Marcus.
“After trialling the research at Bendigo Health, our team was presented with the opportunity to lead the development of the Victorian Allied Health Clinical Supervision Framework. It was very much aligned with my PhD topic and was a great opportunity to share what we had learnt across the state,” he said.
Developed in collaboration with the Victorian Department of Health, the Framework also includes five online training modules for allied health clinicians.
“To see a regional health service lead this work is amazing. I received great support from the education and allied health management teams to undertake this project,” he said.
“Bendigo Health also supported me with study leave, which helped when I needed to write up my findings.”
Though Marcus’s PhD is complete, his passion for research is stronger than ever.
“All of us as health professionals should be involved in research at some level, whether it’s keeping up to date on the latest evidence, conducting and supporting research or completing a higher degree by research such as a Masters or PhD,” he said.
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