The APP (Assessment of Physiotherapy Practice) is a valid instrument designed for use by clinical educators and students to assess workplace based performance of pre-registration physiotherapy students. The APP was developed and collaboratively tested within the constraints of dynamic and unpredictable clinical environments. More than 2000 clinical educators and students across Australia and New Zealand were involved in the development and testing of the APP through three field tests conducted across a four year period.
The APP is a 20-item instrument covering seven domains (professional behaviour, communication, assessment, analysis and planning, intervention, evidence-based practice, and risk management). Non-exhaustive performance indicators accompany each item to guide student learning and provide educators with examples of unambiguous descriptions of observable behaviours that indicate professional practice competence. The domains and their items have been mapped to the current Australian Standards for Physiotherapy Practice aligning assessment with the knowledge, skills and attitudes required for registration as a physiotherapist.
Initial development, implementation and evaluation of the APP was funded by a grant from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, an initiative of the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (now known as the Office of Learning and Teaching).
Following the successful development and uptake of the APP instrument, funding was provided by Health Workforce Australia in 2011 for “The National Web Based Assessment of Competency to Practice in Physiotherapy Project”. The primary aim of this project was to enhance the current features of the APP by converting the paper-based version into an online tool enabling clinical educators and students to complete the assessment through a web interface. Conversion to a web-based application will also enable nationwide benchmarking against de-identified scores.
APPLinkup is an online system designed to manage and collate assessment outcomes for determining competency to practice physiotherapy in a number of countries.It is an web-based version of the APP (Assessment of Physiotherapy Practice) instrument which is currently in use throughout Australia and New Zealand.
Through the application of innovative technology to traditional systems of competency assessment, APPLinkup reduces the burden of paper based assessment by providing real-time management of workplace assessment. It also enables access to online resources for physiotherapy educators to support them in the important task of “assessment for learning”. Once data are saved in APPLinkup they are securely protected, backed-up, accessible by education partners, and available in reports that meet the needs of educators, students and administrators.
Using comparisons to historical data, universities can evaluate effects on student practice associated with changes to curricula, educators can identify professional development required in relation to workplace based assessment, students can monitor changes in their performance across time and all stakeholders can compare outcomes to de-identified nationwide data.
APPLinkup enables the following:
- collation of student results individually and for whole cohorts across programs and years of study
- information for educators on their ratings compared with national data averages
- data on the number of students and types of placements provided by individual facilities and health service districts
- reports for students, educators, health facilities and universities which enable calibration of individual or organization scores against national data
- reduction in duplication of data entry
- instantaneous transfer of information between universities and education partners
- comprehensive data for evaluation and regular review of the measurement properties of the APP instrument
- students can improve skills through reflection and self assessment by self-rating prior to discussing ratings given by clinical educators
- resources to guide best practice in workplace based assessment