Exploring student perceptions of the learning environment in four health professions education programs

The desire to support student learning and professional development, in combination with accreditation requirements, necessitates the need to evaluate the learning environment of educational programs. The Health Education Learning Environment Survey (HELES) is a recently-developed global measure of the learning environment for health professions programs. This paper provides evidence of the applicability of the HELES for evaluating the learning environment across four health professions programs: medicine, nursing, occupational therapy and pharmaceutical sciences. Two consecutive years of HELES data were collected from each program at a single university (year 1 = 552 students; year 2 = 745 students) using an anonymous online survey. Reliability analyses across programs and administration years supported the reliability of the tool. Two-way factorial ANOVAs with program and administration year as the independent variables indicated statistically- and practically-significant differences across programs for four of the seven scales. Overall, these results support the use of the HELES to evaluate student perceptions of the learning environment multiple of health professions programs.