So much to celebrate in Health this T Levels Week

It’s national T Levels week, and Brad and Ryan caught up with Philippa Bennett from Harlow College to help her team get the most out of their ALEX manikin and hear a little about their T Level Course.

Philippa is the Assistant Academy Manager in Health and Science at Harlow, and a national T Level Ambassador.

How is T Level Health preparing students for a career?

T Level Health is a really Level 3 vocational qualification where students learn the theory of health and social care alongside practical skills. But they also have a mandatory placement of 315 hours over the two years. So students will go on placement, come back and embed that knowledge on their course, but also take the knowledge from the course back out onto placement.

We have two members of staff who work in our local NHS Trust, and who bring up-to-date skills and knowledge with them. So what the students learn feels really relevant and current too.

What is there to celebrate about T level health at the moment?

This is our second year running the T Level at Harlow, and we had a really large percentage of students move from our Level 2 to our Level 3 qualification this year, around half. That level of progression is unprecedented in in health and social care.

It’s come about, I think, because the students in the Level 2 programme recognise the T Level. They saw the students in their uniforms, they saw them in busy in the hospital ward, and it was aspirational for them. We’re really pleased with the progression!

What’s the value of a sim suite and what needs to be in it?

The value of the sim suite is that you can teach the theory and then students can go and apply it in practice. For example, it’s not possible to invite people with dementia into the college for the students to work with. But with our brilliant ALEX manikin we can replicate that environment in our sim suite. We can program ALEX to have the signs of dementia so they can still have that learning without needing to interact with a real patient. It’s the same with babies. We can’t bring real babies to the college, but we can have the sim suite to try to replicate the real environment as near as we possibly can.

In terms of equipment, in the T Level Health course, particularly in the first year, students don’t go too deeply into the sorts of clinical skills you’d find, for example, in an operating theatre. But they do need to be measuring blood pressure, taking temperatures, and understanding those physiological measurements. So to have manikins and equipment which enable learning those skills is also really useful.

And the furniture is important too?

Yes! A lot of our students are going on placement in our local hospital, Princess Alexandra. It’s a very different environment to a classroom, so to have the suite there to help them understand what they might see on placement is really important.

The pathway we’re doing is supporting the adult nursing team, so the sim suite needs to feel like an adult ward. So you need those hospital beds that are the same as you’d find in a hospital ward. You need the curtains, down to the jugs and cups of water. We even work with the hospital to send us posters that you would see in their wards to make it feel even more familiar.

All these things help our students prepare for placement. We have taps for hand washing, they wear uniforms and they tie their hair up, which all matter. We want them to walk into that ward and be able to act as clinical practitioners straightaway.

How important is an AI manikin to the course?

Our ALEX manikin is really important for our course because we can develop the students’ communication techniques so they can demonstrate their person-centred care values.

What I really like about ALEX is the feedback that you can get, because in teaching you need to be assessing for learning. So you can do the teaching with ALEX, but then ALEX will also give you the feedback result. We can then do some analysis for tracking to see if the students are improving.

But it’s also good for the students themselves. They can do reflective tasks, which are part of the T Level course, to check how they did and how they think they can improve in the future.

Without an AI manikin like ALEX I don’t think we’d be able many of the case study assessments where there’s a person with a condition who needs support, and the students are doing a mixture of diagnosing and caring.

How have you found working with Simulaids?

I’d like to say a really big thank you to Simulaids for coming in today to support my staff.

We have quite a range of staff in Health and Science, and of course we’ve had some time to play with this amazing ALEX manikin and learn about it in advance of your visit.

But you’ve been able show us how it can link directly to the T Level spec, and given the teachers some really inspirational ideas. They’ll be able to look at the criteria and actually plan lessons around ALEX, so ALEX becomes the central focus.

We have quite a range of teachers in age and background, and in terms of clinical skills, so to have the on-site training from Ryan and Brad today has helped them feel more confident with using the product. There’s no point in in buying all this lovely equipment, if staff don’t know how to use it. So thank you very much for coming!