Students from the School of Health Studies will be helping to improve the patient experience when they conduct assessments of patients at the University of Bradford on Tuesday, 11 November, 2008.

The Physiotherapy students will work with patients from a local support group with the aim of the patients to feed back to inform the students what they did well and not so well.

The ‘patients’ come from a The Expert Patient support group in Shipley who are members of the public who have long term health conditions. Members of the group meet every month at Shipley Library to support each other.

The idea is driven from the Department of Health initiative to have patient centred care, where, service users and carers help to shape the National Health Service.

Service User and Carer Co-ordinator in the School of Health Students, Dr Caroline Plews, said: “At this point in the training these Physiotherapy students have not had the opportunity to work with real patients before so this will give them valuable experience.

“Universities that educate and train the health professionals of the future have realised the need to involve service users and carers.

“These sessions have always been very useful to help the students understand in the very widest sense what it is like to have a certain health condition, how it impacts on people’s lives and how health care professionals can work more effectively with patients and users.

“Within the School of Health we are now trying to think about additional kinds of ways that users of the health services from all communities could be involved. By using the experiences of the Shipley Expert Patient Group we hope these will help students develop more insight into the patient’s perspective of the assessment process.”

Source
Emma Banks
and
Grace Wilder
University of Bradford