Examining Medical Radiation Undergraduates’ Experiences with Challenging Clinical Interactions PhD active

Lead: Jacob Leonard Ago

Supervisor: Andrew Kilgour

Challenging clinical interactions are inevitable within work-integrated learning environments and can affect medical radiation undergraduates’ wellbeing, learning experiences, and professional capability development. Existing literature suggests that students frequently encounter emotionally demanding patient situations, unsupportive supervisory practices, theory-practice discrepancies, and psychologically unsafe clinical environments. Despite growing recognition of these challenges across health professions education, limited research has explored how medical radiation students experience and manage challenging clinical interactions, particularly within the Australian context. This qualitative study aims to explore medical radiation undergraduates’ experiences with challenging clinical interactions during clinical placements and examine their impact on students’ wellbeing, coping, resilience, and professional development. Preliminary findings identified interconnected challenges including difficult patient encounters, variability in supervisory practices, expectation mismatches, and culturally and emotionally complex clinical situations. These experiences contributed to anxiety, self-doubt, emotional exhaustion, reduced confidence, diminished professional identity formation, and withdrawal from learning opportunities. While students employed coping strategies such as emotional distancing, boundary setting, and seeking support from receptive staff, findings suggest that resilience develops through psychologically safe learning environments, mentorship, supportive supervision, and structured feedforward approaches rather than exposure alone. Participants highlighted the importance of communication, debriefing opportunities, anticipatory guidance, simulation-based preparation, and scaffolded supervision. Findings underscore the need for structured support systems and resilience-building strategies within WIL environments. The study will contribute to the development of the Support, Coping, and Resilience (SCoRe) framework to guide educational and clinical strategies that enhance student wellbeing, professional capability development, and patient care outcomes across medical radiation education and potentially other health professions disciplines.