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Learning is in delicate balance with safety, as faculty supervisors try to foster trainee development while safeguarding patients. This balance is particularly challenging if trainees are allowed to experience the educational benefits of failure, acknowledged as a critical resource for developing competence and resilience. While other educational domains allow failure in service of learning, however, we do not know whether or not this strategy applies to clinical training.

We conducted individual interviews of clinical supervisors, asking them whether they allowed failure for educational purposes in clinical training and eliciting their experiences of this phenomenon. Participants’ accounts were descriptively analysed for recurring themes.

Twelve women and seven men reported 48 specific examples of allowing trainee failure based on their judgement that educational value outweighed patient …