Clinical internships are a training strategy that involves students working alongside an expert professional in specific healthcare settings to develop the skills required for their professional role.

The internship, as an educational method, is based on the experiential learning model. Its primary goal is to develop skills, professional identity, and professional belonging. Clinical experience allows students to address unique and complex healthcare situations that cannot be recreated with theoretical approaches alone.

The planning of internship experiences involves a gradual increase in complexity over time, offering students the opportunity to progressively develop professional and organizational autonomy. Each student, over the three-year period, is scheduled to undertake several internship experiences in different contexts, selected by the Director of Professional Education in collaboration with the Professional Education Tutors. The assignment of each student's internship location is planned based on their learning needs, in relation to the course objectives and the level of preparation achieved by each student. The internship program must be flexible and tailored to the student's learning needs, striving to personalize the experience as much as possible.

Service experience allows students to address complex situations that can be resolved by applying acquired knowledge and drawing on tacit knowledge to guide problem-solving. In this case, reflexivity becomes the primary tool and attitude for acquiring professional skills. Therefore, the internship offers not only the opportunity to learn by doing, but also the opportunity to think through doing, to approach problems, and 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.

The internship hours are 660 in the first year, 660 in the second year, and 630 in the third, as defined in the Study Plan based on the corresponding credits (1 credit = 30 hours). In the first year, the internship is a daytime activity, at outpatient and inpatient training sites. In the second and third years, the internship follows a 24-hour shift schedule (daytime and nighttime activities) at outpatient training sites, inpatient/delivery rooms.

Attendance at internships is mandatory, and any absences must be made up. This is recorded in the "internship attendance booklet," a personal document for the student, filled out by the student and signed daily by the professional who supervised the clinical activities.

To ensure the success of the internship experience, students are informed of:

• 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 achieve these standards before the final certification evaluation

Internship learning requires theoretical prerequisites. To this end, tutorial sessions are provided to prepare students for the experience:

• exercises and simulations that develop technical, interpersonal, and methodological skills in protected situations or during experimentation in real-world settings;
• direct field experience under the supervision of a tutor, accompanied by ongoing reflection and review sessions;
• to support these experiential learning processes, students may be assigned teaching assignments (specific written papers and in-depth studies) and guided study assignments. Sometimes these are necessary to refresh the theoretical foundations of the student before experimenting with patient interventions or expensive technologies, to ensure safety.