Open to places increasingly means open to a world-wide student audience and, as a world leader in open and distance learning, the OU has provided inspiration and support to develop learning accessible to people wherever they are located.The OU’s Mission: “The Open University is open to people, places, methods and ideas”
In health, nursing, social care and social work most of our courses address the professional and regulatory frameworks for professional practice in the UK – but many of the challenges we face in the UK are shared by health and social care professionals across the world – how to deliver high quality, compassionate care and how to improve the experience and outcomes of service-users.
Studying outside the UK
OU courses and qualifications are accessible in many but not all countries - find out if you can study with us, and what study support is available.FACT: in 2010/11, we supported 330 health and social care students outside the UK including over 40 studying at Masters level on our postgraduate programme in Advancing healthcare practice.
Global challenges in healthcare
Improving healthcare is a global challenge - and the reach of OU education can help transform practice on a scale not possible with conventional education. Through the Heath Education and Training (HEAT) programme, we are working with organisations such as the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health, UNICEF and the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) to develop the knowledge and skills of community health workers in Ethiopia. Once the initial pilot programme has been evaluated the programme will be extended to further cohorts of several thousand community health workers and over time to all 33,000.
HEAT in a nut-shell
HEAT is a scalable capacity-building programme. And, although primarily intended for community-based health workers, some of the learning materials will be relevant to other cadres of health workers such as midwives, nurses and public health officers in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. The learning resources developed through the project will be made available as open educational resources (OERs) find out more on the HEAT site.
OU-RCN Strategic Alliance
Working in partnership with the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) we have greater potential to work internationally through international nurse-contacts. With RCN we are working to improve access to high quality professional development for all nurses.
OU in China
We are working in partnership with a University Medical School in China to support education and training in mental health through the adaptation and translation of one of our mental health courses developed for a UK audience.