CURRENT PRESS RELEASES

August 2005

August 2005

Making Practice Based Learning Work

The Department of Employment and Learning (Northern Ireland) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England awarded a grant of £250,000 for a collaborative project involving staff from Ulster, Northumbria and Bournemouth universities to make practitioners more effective in promoting the quality of practice based learning. The three year project commenced in January 2003, taking place in Northern and Southern Ireland, North East and South West England.

The project aims to promote practitioner effectiveness at supporting & supervising students in the workplace across a range of healthcare disciplines. It will identify and document good practice on preparing practitioners for their educational role, develop and evaluate learning materials for practitioners, which will then be disseminated across health and social care communities.

The disciplines involved in the project are Dietetics, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, Radiography, and Nursing. The project outcomes will be disseminated to other disciplines where integration of theory and practice-based learning is currently developing, for example, Biomedical Sciences, Podiatry, Clinical Physiology Midwifery and Social Work.

In addition, learning materials developed by the project team will be tested for use in non-health and social care disciplines. These materials have been reviewed by a range of people involved in practice education, including academics, placement facilitators and practice educators.

The project commissioned staff from the universities participating in the project to produce a case study for each of the five disciplines involved in the project. These case studies have been used by the project team to inform development of learning materials, which can be used by practitioners to make them more effective at helping students learn whilst on placement in the workplace. The materials cover various aspects of the educational role of the practitioners supervising students on practice placements. The themes covered in these materials are:

Learning and Teaching in Practice
Supporting Learning in Practice
Assessment in Practice
Reflection in Practice
Diversity in Practice
Generic Skills

The project website also contains materials that have been specifically developed for the project. All of the materials are freely available for use by all concerned with practice education. Official launch of the materials will take place at Northumbria University on 16th September.

The final year of the project will involve evaluation and then wider dissemination of the materials produced as part of this project. A series of workshops publicising the resources and giving attendees an opportunity to comment on the resources will be held on:

Newcastle - 16th September
Glasgow - 13th October
Dublin - 2nd November
Belfast - 18th November
Bournemouth - 13th December

Further Information

Further details are available at the Project website:

http://www.practicebasedlearning.org

Additional information can be obtained by contacting the Project Administrator, Barbara Gregg:

Telephone: 0289 036 8458
E-mail: BM.Gregg@ulster.ac.uk

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