Background Students at Swansea University Medical School undertake one 5-week placement in paediatrics. Students are required to give feedback and can write free text on what they enjoyed and what could be better. This qualitative feedback allows more insight and detail into student’s ideas about their placement. Qualitative feedback can be provide deep insights into student satisfaction and provide themes for improvement. Improving student experiences during such placements may improve paediatric workforce recruitment.

Objectives To analyse the qualitative feedback for the child health attachments between 2016 and 2018 with an aim to identify areas of improvement and areas of good practice. To identify ways to improve areas students feel could be better. This will enable a final thematic analysis for overall areas of good practice and areas of further improvement.

Methods Qualitative analysis was completed through inductive thematic analysis using NVivo, to find the themes that was in the feedback to see what was good and what could be improved

Results The analysis found four main themes. Students appreciated feeling like part of the team, but sometimes felt that they were being ignored rather than being involved with the team. Feedback was crucial for students, they appreciated receiving structured feedback, but would like their weaknesses to be more clearly identified to show how they can improve. Students appreciate a well organised placement and particularly being well supported. Supportive teaching is very important to students, they appreciate the time taken by clinicians to teach them and appreciate the opportunity to teach each other.

Conclusions Students desire to be a part of a learning environment that provides structured learning opportunities. Mutual respect with targeted timetabling for formative and summative feedback is highly desired. Near peer teaching, organisation and supportive teaching with methods for retrieval practice were seen as excellent initiatives. Feedback also provided areas of improvement especially with need for active learning in some weeks. This has led to further changes and we would like to share our good practice with fellow educators.