Clinical hours.

01Read the definition before logging anything.

Your handbook governs everything on this page. Requirements differ between programmes, between tracks inside a programme, and sometimes between intakes, so a rule a classmate on another track repeated to you is not evidence about yours.

The passage worth your attention is not the total. It is the definition of qualifying activity, and most people open it for the first time only once something has already failed to add up. Read it in week one, put it into your own words on a single page, and keep that page beside the log.

Where the wording is ambiguous, put the question to your faculty coordinator by email and keep the reply. Something written down is something you can point at months later. An assurance given in a corridor, however senior the person and however kindly meant, is not.

02The four questions to ask of your own handbook.

Rather than a list of what usually counts, which varies too much to be worth repeating, these are the questions whose answers decide whether your total is real.

• Does anything other than direct supervised contact count at all, and if so, up to what ceiling?
• What is the position on time when your supervisor was elsewhere in the building?
• Is any activity at your own place of work admissible, and under what separation from your paid role?
• Do orientation, onboarding, mandatory training and travel sit inside the count or outside it?
• Where simulation is permitted, what is the cap, and does it need signing off separately?

03The habit that prevents the whole problem.

Total your hours by category once a month, and check each category against what your handbook actually counts rather than against the running total. That is the entire method and it takes about fifteen minutes.

Anybody discovering a gap in the closing weeks almost always held the information much earlier. They were tracking one figure, and inside that figure sat activity which was never going to qualify. Adding up by category exposes it early enough that more can still be arranged.

It also leaves you defensible. If a discrepancy is ever raised you can show categories rather than a total, which is a completely different conversation.

04What this desk does and does not touch.

The log is never completed here. It records that a named person did particular things at particular times, so nobody else can honestly fill it in, whatever system your programme runs and whatever anybody else offers.

What is done is everything around it: reading your handbook against your situation and telling you plainly which of your logged activity is at risk, organising the documentation so completing the log accurately is quick rather than archaeological, and drafting the message to your coordinator when a gap needs raising. Finding the site and the supervisor in the first place is a different job at preceptor outreach, and the writing that trails a clinical day belongs to the nursing desk.

Carrelhouse operates independently of every programme referred to on this page.

Questions at this desk.

Can somebody else complete my log?

No, and it is not a question of price. A log asserts that a named person was in a particular place doing particular things at a particular time, so no one else can fill it in truthfully. Everything surrounding it is work this desk does; the entry itself is permanently yours.

Do hours at my own workplace count?

Only if your handbook permits it, and a good many programmes restrict or forbid it. Those allowing it normally require the student role to be genuinely separate from the paid one, under a different supervisor. Settle that in writing before any of it goes in the log, since unwinding it later is costly.

My supervisor was absent for part of a shift. Does it count?

Usually not, because the requirement measures supervised practice rather than attendance. A few programmes allow a defined quantity of indirect activity inside a supervised placement. Check your own wording, and where absence is frequent put it to your coordinator before banking more of it.

I am short with a few weeks left. What now?

Speak to your faculty coordinator the same day. What they can arrange in week ten simply does not exist in week fifteen, and they have met this before. Alongside that we can look at whether a second site is reachable in the time left, and say so honestly when it is not.

What does this cost?

The category read is free, and for a good many people it is the only thing needed. Beyond that it is priced by the work: organising documentation, or drafting the correspondence a gap requires. Nothing recurs and there is no minimum attached to any of it.