MSc — 2024 entry Leadership in Healthcare

This module is designed to meet the needs of professionals working in health and social care who are interested in introducing change within their practice environment. The module will explore the current healthcare agenda, examining the need for change to meet the contemporaneous needs of the population. Students are encouraged to reflect upon how innovative practice could transform service delivery to improve experience quality, relative to their own area of practice.

The focus of this module is unusually on you as an individual.  We examine where you currently feel you are in the context of your professional, personal, and academic journey.   As professionals working within health and social care environments, much of our daily focus is on others, this module provides students with an opportunity to pause, to reflect, assess and evaluate what you need to develop within your career. This is a great first module for students returning to study, or for anyone wanting to refocus, as the journey of discovery leads to deep learning and enhanced confidence in your professional, personal and academic needs, so provides a direction for future development.

This module empowers health and social care professionals to examine the factors contributing to workplace safety and the care of patients/service users, considering the influence of human factors on safety. Additionally, the module encourages students to critically assess the interplay between national patient safety policies and their impact on local guidelines and policies. Moreover, students will cultivate a critical understanding of the intricate legal and ethical issues affecting patient safety. They will also scrutinise the role of accountability in effectively managing safety and risk in the workplace.

This module expands on student learning from the Leading People in Health and Social Care module, elevating thinking to an organisational and strategic level.   Students will be empowered to explore the complexity of the internal and external organisational environments, valuing openness, collaboration, and the need for continuous organisational learning.  Students will be enabled to recognise and analyse the factors that are key to strategic planning and successfully fulfilling organisational aims and purpose.  

This module builds on the learning from ‘Transforming Services for Quality’ and introduces the fundamental concepts, underpinning theories, and tools of implementation science in improving the quality and effectiveness of health and social care services. Students will have the opportunity to explore how their proposed change initiative could be effectively and routinely implemented in their organisation. They will consider the roadblocks to implementation and strategies to mitigate against these. Students will develop a clear understanding of the similarities and differences between clinical research, quality improvement methods, dissemination and implementation studies and how we can best integrate them to maximise success of implementing small or large scale change initiatives. The assessment will enable them to demonstrate the depth of their understanding and insight into effective application of implementation principles and methods to create a roadmap to stimulate, facilitate, sustain, and scale up positive and successful change in practice for health and social care improvement.

This module provides students with a fundamental understanding of the core principles of engaging, supporting and leading people. Students will be empowered to support or create workplaces where staff thrive and collaborate, enabling patients and users of health and social care services to feel safe and supported. Exploring the concepts of care, compassion, courage, and vulnerability, to develop skills in enhancing relationships and creating safe environments.

The module enables students to understand the theoretical and practical aspects of research; how to design research informed by theoretical, methodological and practical issues; and how to prepare a research proposal relevant to health and social care practice. The module provides students with the knowledge, skills and confidence in planning and writing a research proposal that can be taken forward to the dissertation module.

The dissertation module supports students to plan, undertake and report on a substantial original project that is relevant to their professional practice and their workplace organisations.   Students will choose a topic area of their interest and will be supported throughout the project by a named supervisor. The project will involve developing a relevant research question and outlining the relevant policy context, carrying out a literature review, developing a robust methodology, collecting/identifying and analysing/synthesizing data, and to critically discuss the relevance of the findings to practice and current knowledge.         Students will gain confidence in understanding and applying the research process. The students will have the opportunity to develop skills in research leadership, critical thinking, and writing, translating knowledge into practice, literature reviewing and digital knowledge.