Introduction To Study Skills

This unit aims to foster your understanding of how the skills of literacy, numeracy and information technology can enhance your learning and contribute to evidence based care.

The unit will equip you with the skills needed to become a successful learner in a university setting. It enables you to develop an understanding of how you learn and will enable you to develop the fundamental skills to become a lifelong learner. By the end of the unit you will have identified the knowledge and skills necessary for University study and will have a plan for developing these during the course.

The skills that might be developed while undertaking this unit are transferable and applicable to all types of organisations. They are skills which are fundamental to furthering academic progress in undergraduate and potential postgraduate study in the future.

Project Preparation For Healthcare Practice

This unit aims to enhance your understanding of how to gather evidence and academic literature and how these underpin service improvement within your area of practice and the wider healthcare environment. These are transferable skills fundamental to furthering academic progress.
The unit will enable you to develop the skills required to become an evidence- based enquirer within your field of work, and at the completion of the unit, you will have identified an area of service delivery within your work place that may be improved. 
In undertaking this process, the unit builds upon the foundational work delivered in the Introduction to study skills unit in semester one and prepares you for the project to be undertaken in year two of the course in the Embedding NHS Values (Project) unit.

Health And Wellbeing: Improving Lives

This unit introduces the concept of health and well-being and the role of health promotion in enabling people to increase control over their health. The factors that influence the health and well-being of individuals and the wider community will be discussed. The role of bio-psycho-social factors will be explored in relationship to health and well-being from both a theoretical and practice perspective.
Normal anatomy and physiology will be explored and used to underpin evidence-based health promotion, thus helping people to take responsibility for living healthier lives.

Foundations In Values Based Practice (Wbl)

The aim of this unit is to enable you to develop competence in an assigned range of core skills relevant to the role of all healthcare practitioners and to enhance your understanding of the evidence base for these skills. You will work under the supervision of a practice based mentor who will help you to identify opportunities to develop the skills and to practice them safely. You will also work collaboratively with your mentor and the unit co-ordinator to identify the skills you will develop during the second year of the course. These will be skills which are specific to your workplace and necessary for advancing your healthcare practice.

The practice based elements of this unit are supplemented by lecturer facilitated sessions intended to expand your knowledge and understanding of your practice in the context of the NHS Constitution. You will also explore the values identified by the Chief Nurse as fundamental to care and which apply to all healthcare workers. You will use these to guide your practice.

Person-Centred Care

The aim of this unit is to develop your understanding of the principles of person-centred care. Patients and service users are not merely passive recipients of care and by actively engaging them in the care process they become empowered within the healthcare system. As a healthcare worker an important aspect of your role is to participate in the assessment of service user needs and the planning of appropriate care, through partnership working with service users and their families or carers. In doing so service user care needs and care preferences can be recognised and responded to.

Safeguarding Health And Wellbeing

The unit recognises the need to safeguard the health and wellbeing of service users and healthcare workers. Ill health can increase personal vulnerability in service users and as such, all health care staff have a responsibility for safeguarding individuals. Where standards of care fall below required standards healthcare workers are obliged to make their concerns known by following safeguarding and whistleblowing procedures. This unit aims to equip you with the ability to respond to challenging situations which compromise quality of care and increases patient vulnerability. Such challenges are often associated with a cost to the healthcare worker so emphasis is placed on protecting your own and others, health and well-being.

Healthcare Policy And Quality

The aim of this unit is to help you consolidate your knowledge and understanding of what constitutes high quality compassionate healthcare by focusing on the quality standards embedded within legislation, policies and quality benchmarks at both national and local level.
This unit will enable you to reflect upon, analyse and evaluate the health and social needs of the local and wider UK population. Emphasis will be placed on how these needs inform the provision of high quality healthcare and how this healthcare is influenced by national policies and wider codes of conduct that govern healthcare practice in your workplace. You will explore the ethical and moral health and social care issues associated with healthcare provision for specific health problems.
This unit offers you opportunities to take a more global perspective on some aspects of health and illness to help you to respond more effectively with patients/service users and the wider community,

Enhancing Care In Practice (Wbl)

The aim of this unit is to enable you to consolidate the core skills developed in year one of the course and to develop competence in more complex core skills and skills that are specific to your area of practice. The specific skills are those you identified in partnership with your mentor and unit lead in the work-based learning unit in year 1 of the course.

The components of the Practice Assessment Document are aligned to skills associated with the Knowledge and Skills Framework, initially published in 2004. These are communication, person and people development; health safety and security; quality; equality and diversity and more recently added, service improvement (currently information and knowledge).

You will work under the supervision of a practice based mentor who will help you to identify opportunities to develop the skills and to practice them safely and in accordance with the NHS Constitution, the fundamental care values, national policies and legislation ensuring safe care delivery with compassion. You will develop your identity as a member of the healthcare team with responsibility for enhancing care in practice.

The practice based elements of this unit are supplemented by lecturer facilitated seminars which will assist you to expand your knowledge and understanding of the evidence base for your practice.

Embedding Nhs Values In Practice (Project)

All healthcare workers have responsibility for contributing to the quality enhancement of healthcare provision to patients /service users and their carers. The aim of this unit is to encourage you to review service delivery within your workplace and to identify the ways in which you can improve the patient experience.

You will be required to identify an area which offers scope for development in your workplace and which is informed by one of the values stated in either the NHS Constitution or Compassion in Practice and propose a project to address one of these areas.