What your reps are up to...

An update on the work of the Nursing, Midwifery and Health Department at Coach Lane Campus

• A lot of you from February onwards will have been working hard out in clinical practice and I hope you all found these allocations to be enriching learning opportunities. In that time, you will have noticed that a decision was made to close the CLC West Café and Shop due to it no longer being financially viable. Let us make this an opportunity to enhance the services already at Coach Lane, starting with you attendance at the Chartwell’s food focus group tomorrow (26^th April) at 3:00pm in the collaborative working space at CLC, your feedback is more influential than you think with regards to making positive change in the university.
  Very shortly we will also be thinking about alternatives for the empty space at CLC and will be acquiring your feedback on the ground at CLC and also online in order to decide on the best possible way to optimise the space for the students!

   

• Myself and Kristy, your VP Activities and Coach Lane lead have taken the results of the placement survey which we launched in January (thank you to everyone who contributed, your feedback has been invaluable) and shared these with our Faculty Executive Pro-Vice Chancellor for Learning and Teaching.
  The main issues in the survey were: -
  - Clear communication of when placements will be announced
  - Criteria for travel as we had a lot of mentions of swaps going on
  - The issue of making complaints about placement and it being identifiable who made the complaint by the placement provider
  Going forward we will be meeting with the Director of Placements and team in order to set out clear policies and guidelines to improve communication amongst the placement team, programme leaders, GT reps and yourselves.
   

• I received feedback regarding lack of computer spaces especially for collaborative study. There are pop-up IT labs in CLC West which I felt went unnoticed due to poor advertising. I’m pleased to say that as of Easter we have secured more posters to direct students to these spaces with computers and work stations as well as a new digital slide promoting the lab to be added to the Coach Lane digital signage screens!
   

• This month we celebrated the achievements of the academic representation team and awarded a very well deserving Gemma Bradshaw, GT Rep for Operating Department Practice as Guidance Tutor rep of the year – we had so many excellent candidates at the Education and Activity Awards respectively. Congratulations too to the other winners who took one for the Coachies, including treasurer of the year and a highly commended Physiotherapy Society of the Year!

• We have recruited a new academic representation team for the next academic year and I am looking forward to coming back next year in a new role of Lead Faculty Representative for Health and Life Sciences, overseeing all of Coach Lane and some of City Campus – if you want to get involved with representation next year, send me an email! k.mcelderry-wilkinson@northumbria.ac.uk

Best of luck during assessment period!

Kayleigh (Department Representative for Nursing, Midwifery and Health)