Practice Education Symposium 2024

On 19th February, the Allied School of Health hosted the Annual Practice Education Symposium. It was attended by professional colleagues in Dietetics, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, and Speech and Language Therapy. We welcomed back our practice educators for a successful day of insightful presentations and interactive workshops.
The theme of this year's conference was “Placement through a different LENS”. The aim was to reconceptualise the idea of what a healthcare placement means for students of allied health who will engage with evolving health and social care services. It also allowed us to consider the attributes that our graduates will need to be future clinicians and leaders in healthcare or in other fields.
The Symposium started with a virtual visit from our Keynote speaker, Prof. Gillian Nisbeth, from Sydney Australia. She spoke about “Reconceptualising Clinical Placement from Australia”. This was continued by a lively question and answer session between Gillian and the practice educators.
The first workshop of the involved Placement Assessment. Here the UL Practice education team discussed and developed ideas to help facilitate assessment.
Three research and development projects were presented by the Practice education team at the SAH. The first project was presented by Marie O’Donnell (Practice Education Coordinator for the BSc Physiotherapy). This project was “A study investigation of the psychometric and edumetric properties of a revised Common Assessment Form”.
The next project was about “Progressing Disability Services (PDS) Interdisciplinary Learning Resource: Finding a common Lens to Help Build Relationships in Healthcare”. This was presented by Lexi Keating (RPF) and Baerbel Schlueter (Children’s Services Manager, Avista.
The third project was presented by Jane Kavanagh, Grainne Quinlan and Aisling Goode. This project was called “Seeing in 3D…and what a difference it makes”.
The day ended with our final workshop on wellbeing. The SAH wanted to acknowledge the stress in everyone’s work life and develop some tools that might help people to deal with this stress, such as looking through a different lens.
Overall, this day was a great success. Through the discussions of these presentations and projects, the practice educators developed new insights and ideas for student healthcare placement at the SAH.