What you will study
Your work for this module will be more self-directed than in your earlier modules, but you will continue to have access to a study group and a tutor to help shape your enquiries over the coming year. You will work with your tutor to plan your enquiries and need to update them regularly on your current activity.
Scholarship involves a demonstration of your ability to enquire, design, analyse, debate, argue and recommend in ways that demonstrate rigorous thought and a good command of issues and information. You will need to demonstrate what you already know and do, and advance a vision for further improvements that benefit the beneficiaries of your healthcare improvement activities (e.g. patients/clients of your service). To help you achieve this, you are led through five study blocks of work during the one-year module:
- Enquiry, conception and design
- Review of relevant evidence
- Analysing experience
- Reviewing progress
- Making the case to others.
Your enquiry will be conceived as an investigation of existing data and as a series of disciplined practice reflections and discussion, the review of literature and discourse with colleagues interested in healthcare improvement (personal and collective experience). Your review of experience will be drawn from your day-to-day practice and discussions with colleagues in your context. This module does not require you to design and conduct a research project (there are no questionnaires, interviews or data-gathering instruments to design) nor should your work be designed so as to require submission to a research ethics committee. Rather it relies on heightened skills of speculative reflection and debate associated with work that you conduct with others. It will be necessary therefore to select an enquiry that relates closely to your day-to-day healthcare improvement practice and to engage in reflection at a deeper level than you may currently be accustomed to. The study guide will instruct you in the relevant techniques to enable this. Working in this way, and combining what you learn from your review of evidence with current experience, you will be assisted to make a coherent case for improvement.
The study materials provide a scaffold that enables you to complete your enquiries and prepare work that you can demonstrate to others. The tutor-marked assignments and the end-of-module assessment constitute an exhibition of your enquiries those that illustrate disciplined powers of reflection and analysis. You will need to be well organised, focused and consultative in order to meet the assessment deadlines and complete your enquiries alongside other professional work. You will work on study blocks Review of relevant evidence and Analysing experience in parallel.
You will learn
On successful completion of this module you will be able to:
- systematically conduct enquiries in the literature, reflections on your own practice and local contexts, making appropriate records of your learning in ways that demonstrate scholarship
- disseminate your knowledge and skills in ways that are relevant to the development of practice now and in the future
- present clear observations, arguments and conclusions about your chosen aspect of practice, so that others could either replicate or build on your scholarship
- defend the advancement of practice within your enquiry, making the case to an appropriate authority.
Transferable skills
On successful completion of your module you will be able to:
- work collaboratively
- manage uncertainty
- translate concepts into practice
- demonstrate self-direction and originality in tackling and solving problems
- utilise information technology
- retrieve, interpret and utilise data (qualitative and quantitative), information and evidence.