Clinical experience forms part of the One Year Foundation Course and Four Year Professional Training.
One of the greatest strengths of the College is the range of teaching clinics on offer. Clinical training is a key focus of your education and has always been at the heart of the College’s teaching clinics.
Each clinic has its own flavour depending on location and the clinician. In our student clinics you will find the everyday and the extraordinary. With pathology ranging from serious to common and everyday ailments.
Experiencing the different styles of well-qualified homeopaths, you will observe patients and case-taking and contribute to remedy and dosage debates and decisions. You will learn to distinguish the expression of illness that needs treatment, and see remedy pictures lived out in people’s symptoms.
Students gain a minimum of 120 hours participating in clinics over the four years. During this time you will be encouraged to develop your insight and discernment. The homeopath will comment on your observation skills including your ability to hear the patient and read their body language and subtleties. You will develop an increasing depth in your perception of the symptom pattern needing to be cured. You will also reflect on your emerging skills and areas where you wish to develop.
Clinical Supervision
We want you to be the best homeopath that you can be. The most intense part of that process is taking your own cases under the supportive eye of a supervising homeopath.
Your own case-taking is a further development of your direct contact with patients. This begins, under supervision and within a co-ordinated structure, from later in your first year. At that stage, you will develop a small portfolio of cases around everyday illness like hay fever or coughs, applying your classroom learning directly.
In years 3 and 4, you will be taking more complex cases, which will be presented as part of your evidence for graduation.
During your own cases, your supervisor is there to guide you as a teacher; and, as a homoeopath, to ensure patients receive safe, beneficial and professionally protected treatment. Together, you will map skills you have successfully demonstrated. This evidence builds, with clinic reports, into your professional portfolio, so that when everything required for graduation is complete, you will receive a licence to practise.
All College supervising homoeopaths are additionally trained in person-centred supervision to support the reflective aspect of your learning. Person-centred supervision is based on mutuality – a shared responsibility for the learning process and an environment of empathy and respect.