Stakeholder involvement in the development of an inter-professional service improvement module: Practising what we preach in “Working Together to Lead Service Improvement"

Inter-professional working is an essential component of health-care practice today and is therefore deemed fundamental to health-care professional education. Higher education institutes are encouraged to provide inter-professional experiences for students (HCPC 2014) whilst also ensuring students gain a sound understanding of the values and unique nature of their own profession (COT 2014). 302CC- “Working Together to Lead Service Improvement” is a final year undergraduate module addressing change, leadership and service improvement. The module has around 600 students from courses such as dietetics, physiotherapy, midwifery, occupational therapy and nursing. Considering the service users’ perspectives, as well as their own profession-specific philosophy and values base, students work collaboratively in discreet action learning sets to develop innovative service improvement proposals. These proposals are supported by literature and embed critical appraisal and evaluation of relevant theory and health and social care policy. Fundamental to this module is the students’ ongoing recognition of the service users being key to the development and evaluation of their service improvement proposal. This emulates the team’s teaching and learning, and evaluation strategy, thus enabling the students to be led by example. In practising what we preached, it was considered that key principles around shared leadership and values and collaborative team working would be evident, thus encouraging effective application to practice.
This session will focus on the key involvement of stakeholders (students, service-users, practice partners and tutors) in all aspects of the module, including the development of the content of the module, the clinical scenarios as a focus for improvement and the assessment of students completing the module. It aims to present evaluation of this partnership working, from all perspectives and subsequently how this evaluation has informed further developments regarding stakeholder involvement.
References
COT (2014) College of Occupational Therapists’ learning and development standards for pre-registration education. London: COT
HCPC (2014) Standards of education and training. London: HCPC