We welcomed a panel from the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health for this edition of our ‘In Conversation With…’ events. A panel answered some faculty-based questions for students.

The panel consisted of:

• Dr Simon Igo - Associate Dean - Student Experience
• Dr Suzanne Hilton – Head of School

The event was chaired by Lucy Goodacre and Emily Long from CUSU. We picked out three of the key questions from the event below…

Having all the resources available in Alison Gingell, why is there not more live demonstrations, so students can experience how to act in real life scenarios?

Previously, we've been able to set up ‘scenario events; around the Alison Gingell building. We’ve had a ‘fire’, there was a ‘major disaster’ etc. What we do is we set up all of the services around the Alison Gingell building, so there's essentially lots of people ‘role playing’. We've got patients coming through until the ambulance and then onto the wards. It's a huge day-long event. We're testing out all of our students to be involved in that process, in terms of what their role might be in such an event.

We've been talking about the fact we haven't been able to do this because of the pandemic. It was more than two years ago since we did the last one, but we are beginning to talk about doing this again.

Why don't we do something that's to do with an ‘aeroplane crash’? In the Engineering building, we've got an aeroplane. What's that like for the paramedics extracting people from an aeroplane rather than just extracting them from a house? What does that mean in terms of then transporting them to the actual Alison Gingell building? And what would we have to think about?

The conversations are ongoing and I would be hopeful that at some stage we would be able to put on a simulation event of that kind. And as I say, the pandemic has held us in a back a little bit, but we are getting to that point now where we were able to do some of these things again.

Is there anything being done to help with the workload of assignments that need to be completed alongside student having to do placements?

We're constantly reviewing our assessment strategy. We want to assess appropriately, but we don't want to over assess people. We want to make sure that there's enough assessment to make sure that at the end of the course, we can be confident that we can send you out into the world as registered healthcare professionals from the undergraduate courses, but equally from the postgraduate courses. We want to make sure we're assessing you at the right level that's required for UG/PG level.

With the issue about placements; I'm thinking there might be two things going on here. One of the things is about the fact that the university changed it’s regulations a year or two ago, and what we were required to do was make sure that there was something called and applied core assessment in all of our modules. What this is meant is that for those people who are going out on placement, they get assessed for the placement i.e. What they're doing on placement. But they've also had to do a piece of written work alongside that placement.

Now, at the time, we were asking for an exception to say ‘this doesn't apply for this particular module’ for our health courses. At the time we were told that that this was a new rule and we were going to need to do it.

I've had another conversation about this this year, because we recognize the pressure that it's putting on students. What we want to do is change that, and we will need to go to the General University Academic Board to get their approval to change this. It's not something that's a quick fix for us and it's not something that necessarily the school introduced, but it was part of the wider university idea about how we should be assessing students.

It is something I'm picking up and I'm hoping that we can change.

How are placements allocated?

Placement allocation is very complicated. We have multiple students, multiple placements and multiple placement providers. It's a very complex piece of work that we have to do in terms of allocating students, and we take lots of things into consideration; where they live, whether they drive, but equally what experiences they've had already and what experiences they are going to have in the future, so people obviously never go back to the same place once. Students need to have a variety of experiences in order to be able to qualify. It is very complicated, and we effectively do the best we can.

It's not an exact art here. We have to just complete as many pieces of the jigsaw. What sometimes happens is that students end up with a home trust, and that way that student has the benefits of them getting to understand how that trust works. There are benefits around that, because when you begin on placement then you're familiar with the environment, where everything is, the policies and procedures, etc.

All I can say is that the teams work as hard as possible to effectively look at all of the various different variables that they need to think about and try and allocate students to placements as fairly as they possibly can. If there was a particular reason why you needed to be at a different place in a different location, then again, you can ask your academic assessor or the course director and make a particular request. But it's very difficult to accommodate. Everybody has individual requests.

There are not many of our ‘In Conversation With…’ events left! A full schedule, and the articles of the previous events, is available here: In Conversation With...Semester Two | Coventry University Students' Union (cusu.org). A full transcript and video will be made available shortly.