Background: Undergraduate nursing students’ learning during clinical practice is surrounded with complexity, taking its point of departure in demands and challenges connected to supervision and health care. Worldwide, reports show that lack of knowledge, skills and caring behaviour causes patients’ suffering. The Model for Improvements in Learning Outcomes (MILO) is theoretically grounded in hermeneutics along with Eriksson’s theory of caritative caring, designed to intertwine didactics, pathophysiology and medicine with specific concepts important for learning. Caring and learning are understood as parallel phenomena. MILO was implemented in an undergraduate nursing education in southern Sweden with the intention to facilitate learning during clinical practice and contribute to development of a caring approach in the students.

Aim: To describe supervisors’ experiences of undergraduate nursing student’s learning during clinical practice when using a caritative caring conceptual learning model.

Method: A qualitative and explorative design containing four focus groups interviews. Open unstructured questions were used. Seventeen supervisors, purposefully sampled, from different departments at three hospitals participated. Data were analysed using inductive content analysis. 

Results: Learning was found to be enhanced as a result of a facilitated intertwining between theory and practice and the natural and the professional care. Being twosomes, use of specific documents enhanced learning as well as the use of openness, compliance and reflections based on the students’ pre-understanding. Students’ encounters with the patients developed an understanding and sensitivity of the patients’ needs, a natural holistic view was developed, emphasizing the patient’s perspective. 

Conclusion: An awareness of the natural elements that occur in daily life and how these can contribute to intertwine theory and practice is important for learning during clinical practice. 

Implication for caring in a changing world: The achieved knowledge can contribute to how clinical competence can be gained and how a caritative caring approach in the students can be developed.