Clinical internship is a training strategy that involves the student being supported by an expert professional, in specific healthcare contexts, in order to acquire the skills required by the professional role.

The internship as an educational method is based on the learning from experience model. The main purpose is the development of skills, identity and professional belonging. The clinical experience allows the student to deal with unique and complex healthcare situations, which cannot be recreated with theoretical approaches alone.

The planning of internship experiences involves a gradual increase in complexity over time, to offer the student the opportunity to engage in a progressive assumption of professional and organizational autonomy. For each student, in the three-year period, different internship experiences are planned in different contexts, chosen by the Director of professional education in collaboration with the Tutors of professional education. The assignment of the internship location to each student is planned taking into account the learning needs in relation to the objectives of the course year and the level of preparation achieved by the individual student. The internship path must be flexible and aimed at the student's learning needs, trying to personalize the experience as much as possible.

The experience in services allows the student to deal with complex situations that can be resolved by putting into practice the knowledge acquired and by using tacit knowledge that guides him in solving problems. In this case, reflexivity becomes the tool and the priority attitude to be able to learn professional skills. The internship therefore offers not only the possibility of learning to do, but the possibility of thinking about doing, of approaching problems, to question the possible and multiple meanings of what is encountered in the experience.

The role of the tutor as supervisor and facilitator of learning within the internship context is therefore essential.

For a successful outcome of the internship experience, students will be informed about:

• the learning objectives to be achieved
• the standards used to evaluate their performance and the elements that will contribute to the final internship evaluation
• failure to meet these standards prior to the final certification assessment

Learning in the internship requires theoretical prerequisites, to this end tutorial sessions are planned that prepare the student for the experience:

• exercises, simulations in which technical, relational and methodological skills are developed in protected situations or during experimentation in real contexts;
• direct experience in the field with tutor supervision accompanied by constant sessions of reflection and re-elaboration of the experience;
• to support these experiential learning processes, the student may be assigned educational tasks (specific written essays and insights) and guided study assignments. Sometimes these are necessary to help the student recover theoretical prerequisites before experimenting with interventions on the patient or on expensive technologies, to guarantee safety conditions.