The National Placement Evaluation Centre (NPEC), owned and managed by Health Education Services Australia (HESA), continues its work monitoring and improving clinical placements for nursing and midwifery students.
The second annual NPEC summary report is now available from the NPEC website https://npec.com.au/references-and-bibliography/. This 2025 summary reports on the 2024 national data set with some comparisons to the first report findings.
The NPEC commenced collecting nursing and midwifery student and supervisor evaluations of the educational quality of clinical learning in mid 2022. Now the PET-Nursing and PET-Midwifery are validated tools. The PET-Supervisor is contextualised for use by supervisors. By June 2025 the Centre has collected nearly 50 000 evaluations from PET- Nursing >47 000, PET-Midwifery >2 000 and PET-Supervisor >350.
In 2024, we collected feedback from over 19,400 nursing students, 894 midwifery students, and 248 supervisors. Student satisfaction scores remained strong, with small improvements across the board:
- Nursing students: Average satisfaction score of 8.32/10
- Midwifery students: Average satisfaction score of 8.19/10
- Supervisors: Average satisfaction score of 8.76/10 (first year reported).
Overall, students told us they value placements where;
- they feel supported,
- receive regular feedback,
- and can work closely with experienced staff.
However, some ongoing challenges were again highlighted including;
- Students not always feeling valued,
- Inconsistent feedback,
- Staff unwillingness to work with students,
- Missed opportunities to learn from the broader healthcare team
- Some students said negative placement experiences made them question whether to continue their studies.
Supervisors also reported frustration with staff attitudes and student preparedness.
The 2024 results build on last year’s findings, showing where the sector is doing well — and where we need to do better to support students and future health professionals.
Member registration: The NPEC invites registration from all Australian stakeholders working to support or provide nursing and midwifery degree level student clinical learning experiences. Once registered members can access automated and raw downloadable data sets related to their registered students (education providers) or any student attending clinical placements at their organisation (placement providers).
The Future
The team will focus on;
- Recruiting placement provider organisations to register to access their datasets,
- Large placement provider organisations partnering with NPEC to directly, disseminate the placement evaluation tools (PET),
- More efforts to help students understand the value of completing PETs,
- Efforts to encourage more supervisors to complete evaluations.
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