Having initially commenced in Spring 2019, HEE Enabling Effective Learning Environment funding was awarded to the Place based project in March 2020. Theresa Hopley, project lead from Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust, and Deborah O’Connor, who is leading on the formal evaluation of this project at Manchester Metropolitan University, have kindly provided their perspective and further information about the project here.

This project highlights the importance of partnership and process in the identification and development of new learning environments. It exemplifies the GM Health and Care Learning Environment Strategy theme of driving innovation in models to support practice education across Greater Manchester. The outputs from this project underpin work involved in the first year of implementation of the GM Health and Care Learning environment strategy.

Learners coming to complete a clinical learning experience at Tameside & Glossop will soon be offered a fresh and innovative approach as standard – that is our aspiration. Over the last few months, we have been piloting a more structured approach to learning experiences that follow a number of clinical pathways.

Over the last two years, I have had the great pleasure of steering and supporting the local project team in developing a more enriching learning experience offer. This enables learners to be exposed to a range of services and sector providers that traditional clinical learning environments have not be able to offer in the past.

To date, we have adopted this new pathway approach for first and second year nursing and physiotherapy learners from Manchester Metropolitan University and The University of Manchester. A total of 31 learners have been through our programme across the two cohorts.

We are very proud of the success so far. Both learners and learning experience providers have evaluated their experiences very positively so far.

Key features of our pathway approach include:

• Learners follow one of four pathways across Mental Health, Cancer, Child & Young Adults and Frailty and Ageing Well.
• Each learner is issued with their own individualised pre-programmed timetable in advance of starting in Tameside and Glossop
• Learners are invited to joint (nurses and physiotherapists) sessions at the start (induction), during (expert guest speakers’ educational afternoons) and end (evaluation workshop).
• To overcome COVID-19 restrictions, we have extended an element of the timetable to online learning via MS Teams. Project work, as well as opportunities to carry out curriculum-related research, are also accommodated.

Lesson learnt to date:

• Learning around people, families and communities.
• This approach needs the collaboration and engagement of many key stakeholders ranging from educational intuitions, primary and secondary care, as well as the private, independent and voluntary and charitable sectors.
• Needs someone organised to pull together.
• Learners who have open minds and willing to grasp the experiences on offer.
• Practice supervisors and assessors who can create learning opportunities and think outside the box.

Next steps:

• Develop a sustainable model that isn’t so time consuming.
• Extend to other professional groups beyond nursing and physiotherapy.

Place-based formal evaluation

As this is such a new and innovative model for learning environments, we secured monies from HEE to carry out a formal evaluation piece to inform and educate going forwards. 

Ethical approval was granted, and the evaluation was designed as a mixed methods evaluation incorporating a survey to all the learners who have been placed with us, followed by in-depth interviews of those learners who agreed and of the educators who have supported the learners in practice.

Cohort 1 learners have been surveyed, and both staff and learners were invited to participate in interviews. Unfortunately, the timing of this coincided with lockdown and the second COVID-19 wave, so availability for interviews was very limited. We are currently preparing for the evaluation for Cohort 2 and will be sending out information to both staff and learners about this in the next week, to try and ensure increased numbers and greater representation of views.

The learning from this innovative place-based model will be considered and reported later this year, with a view to publishing the results of this evaluation and sharing our work on a wider platform. Watch this space for more details as the evaluation data is presented over the coming months!

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