In an attempt to increase the number and range of fieldwork education opportunities for students in the disciplines, the Ontario Council of University Programs in Rehabilitation Sciences through funding from the Ministry of Health of Ontario engaged in a series of pilot projects to explore new models of supervision. The goal of this project was to explore a supervision model that would be suitable for part-time therapists and their full-time students. Particular emphasis was placed on finding backup systems that would enable part-time therapists to assume responsibility for full-time students. Thirteen Occupational Therapy students were involved in pilot projects at 12 separate sites across the province of Ontario. The part-time therapists worked between 10 and 30 hours per week. Although the opportunity to pilot the part-time therapist/full-time student placement was open to all disciplines, only Occupational Therapy programs participated. It is unknown whether characteristics of the discipline of Occupational Therapy make part-time therapist supervision more feasible or whether it was simply an artifact of opportunities that were available at the time. The pilot projects were evaluated through a process of quantitative surveys and qualitative information gained through interviews with the preceptors, journaling by the students, and student and preceptor responses to open ended questions on pre and post questionnaires. The lessons learned from these pilot projects have been incorporated into the development of the resource guide entitled "

This manual is intended to be a resource for students, their fieldwork educators, and university fieldwork coordinators as they recruit appropriate placement sites and/or develop strategies suitable to the specific needs of each individual fieldwork site. Given the small number of pilot placements from which the information in this manual was derived, the user should consider this manual to be a starting point rather than a complete guidebook. Further experience with the Part-Time Therapist/Full-Time Student supervision model will likely continue to generate new insights and strategies. The sharing of these strategies is encouraged and periodic updates of this manual may be necessary as new information becomes available. Additional experiences of this model in fieldwork placements of other rehab disciplines would also further expand the manual. The contents of this 24 page manual includes information on the Roles and Responsibilities of agencies, students and educators, back up systems, student and fieldwork educator characteristics, summary of findings of the pilot project, benefits of model, strategies and variations of the model, facilitators for supervision and adult learning and a week by week guide for structuring the experience.