Liz Sear, Senior Lecturer, Foundation Degree in Health and Social Care

Liz Sear

My journey with ‘Fred’ stemmed from a re-design of the first year foundation degree module in Health and Social Care which explores inter-professional and multi-agency working and person-centered care. I wanted to devise a way to make what could be a dry topic interesting and relevant for the students. A particular challenge with this was how to help the students create meaning for themselves of these concepts when the majority of them were at the beginning of their working lives and therefore had little or no relevant experience to draw upon.

One of my colleagues Karen Brasher had an idea of using a case study based upon a fictitious character with complex health and social care needs to show the students the types of professionals and agencies who might be involved in their care. I decided to use this idea to develop this concept as it could be offered as an online learning resource, adapted easily and released to the students in stages throughout the module.

Accordingly, Karen and I wrote a script based upon a 45 year old Afro-Caribbean male called Fred who had become unemployed and as a result of this had experienced financial difficulties, a relationship breakdown, substance misuse and eventually became street homeless.

To bring the script ‘alive’ I considered the use of animation but although I discovered that this was possible, the estimated cost proved to be prohibitive.

As an alternative Anne Misselbrook the Content Developer and myself developed Fred into an online format using Xerte as this software lent itself well to the storyboard design, it was readily available and meant that Fred could be modified and edited easily during production by Anne and myself.

Adopting a flipped learning approach, the students were divided into small student groups and worked on the module’s online activities synchronously and asynchronously in their own time and in the time allocated to the module followed by seminars in which they discussed the online activities and shared their learning and understanding.

Overall, the students’ feedback has been positive, their comments have indicated that Fred as a case study has been successful in transforming an abstract concept into a concrete idea from which they can negotiate a personal understanding of inter-professional and multi-agency working. Students have also commented that Fred has helped them to recognize the ways in which different health and social care professionals and agencies can work together for the benefit of service users.

One of the assessments for the module required the students to reflect upon their experiences of Fred and of working within their groups and participating in the seminars. Overall I have been very pleased with the level of insight that the students have shown in their reflections and the links that they have been able to make between Fred’s narrative and inter-professional and multi-agency working and the role that this plays in person-centered care. Moreover students have demonstrated the connections that they have made between the challenges and benefits of working within their own groups and how this might reflect the challenges and rewards of multi-agency working in practice and the implications that this can have for the provision of health and social care services that are safe, effective and place the needs and preferences of service users first.