The practicum is one of the most important components in health professional education. It is also one of the most challenging. Spending time in the acute care hospital setting can be confronting, stressful and upsetting for health professional students (Andrews et al., 2006) . James and Chapman (2010) investigating student nurses' clinical placement experiences identified a key theme as 'being overwhelmed and confronted'. A systematic review of qualitative research of student nurses found that

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... 'stress and coping' underpinned the practicum experience in this profession (Thomas, Jack, & Jinks, 2012) . Students may experience emotionally confronting situations on clinical placements (e.g. patient death) and do not necessarily receive adequate debriefing for those events (Macdonald & Tighe, 2014) . Students may carry negative emotions from these experiences, with the potential to affect their future working lives; thus it is important for the university to utilise specialised learning and teaching strategies to enable students to process their experiences. Debriefing is a learning and teaching strategy that can be used post-practicum to ameliorate the stress associated with the placement environment and to provide students with the opportunity to develop reflective skills and knowledge in self-care and to embed practicum evaluation within the curriculum (Mackenzie, 2002) .