News : Wessex Bay Bid Success
27 April 2006
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Wessex Bay Bid Success HSC has been successful in a bid to the Health Science and Practice Subject Centre of the Higher Education Academy involving the Simulated Community. |
The winning project - lead by Janet Scammell, Maggie Hutchings and Anne Quinney - is titled "A virtual practice community for student learning and staff development in health and social work inter-professional education; changing practice through collaboration." A full grant of £10,000 was awarded and the project runs from January 2006 through to December 2007.
As part of the development of an inter-professional curriculum in health and social work education, a ‘virtual’ web-based simulated community called Wessex Bay has been created, peopled by health and social care users and providers, living and working in a seaside town with a rural hinterland. The purpose of this community is to act as a learning resource for geographically dispersed health and social work students and teaching staff in order to facilitate inter-professional collaboration and learning around a variety of health and social care case scenarios. The concept of the virtual practice community is to integrate the simulated community with Bournemouth University’s VLE to enable the communities of practitioners, students and tutors, to collaborate and develop their inter-professional practice through face-to-face and online interaction.
The simulated community aims to facilitate student enquiry and effective learning within a safe but challenging inter-professional environment by using 'live' individuals situated within an authentic community as case studies for analysis and problem-solving. The scenarios are being developed so they can be managed and manipulated by tutors to actively engage students in a variety of online and face-to-face learning activities including case analysis and decision-making, discussion and debate, role play, and collaborative problem-solving, to support preparation for clinical practice, by developing awareness of the service user/patient perspective, exploring values, professional roles, awareness of the range of services available and the legal interventions that might be required. Wessex Bay also enables information and communication technology to be embedded in the curriculum.
The project has so far involved a student survey of views on inter-professional education prior to unit delivery and the use of simulated community materials in the undergraduate inter-professional programme over the last couple of months. The project involves working with colleagues across HSC from a wide range of subject areas and has the potential of transferability to other Schools within Bournemouth University.
