M06HLS - Leadership, Service Improvement and Integrated Care - Coventry University

Aims and Learning Outcomes

This module aims to provide students with opportunities to study leadership, contemporary thinking on organisations, quality and service improvement, project management, and to contextualise these within policy and professional frameworks.

The module draws on theories of clinical leadership, applied systems thinking and learning organisation theory to promote creative entrepreneurial approaches to hitherto intractable dilemmas of clinical practice, ensuring that the patient or service user is central to the management and organisation of health and social care.

Experiences of healthcare organisations will be used as a foundation for analysis of quality improvement and the principles and theories will be applied to healthcare worldwide.

The aims of the module are to encourage the development of critical appraisal and critical analytical skills, which should enable you to utilise service improvement tools and initiatives effectively in your own professional practice.

On completion of this module, you should be able to:

LO1) Analyse and justify patient-led improvements to health and social care delivery within your own field of practice.

LO2) Critically reflect on professional-patient relationships with a particular emphasis on ensuring integrated care, and improving the quality of the patient journey.

LO3) Critically analyse the application of quality improvement theories and techniques to health and social care services in differing cultures and contexts.

LO4) Critically analyse theories of leadership and apply them to health and social care settings.

LO5) Evaluate and apply theories of change and contemporary organisation theory to inter-professional practice in health and social care.

LO6) Critically analyse the shifting relationships between professional identity, managerial imperatives and social entrepreneurship in your own practice.

Whilst students may initially find these learning outcomes challenging to conceptualise, the module staff will help you to understand them and how to apply them to your course work around service improvement and leadership. With help, the key themes of the learning outcomes are that students should be able to demonstrate:

• Analysis and critical thinking which includes finding and critically reviewing relevant literature and data, and applying their thinking to the subject.
• The patient or service user is the main focus of all student work around leadership and service improvements.
• Understanding theoretical models sufficiently well that they can apply them in a relevant way to their subjects and can even make rational and justifiable adaptations to the models as required.

Module Assessment

The module is assessed by the completion of a single piece of coursework that is a 3500 word essay on the impact of leadership and change on the quality of healthcare provision. The coursework assesses all learning outcomes of this module.

The Brief for the Final Assignment Coursework

Reflecting on your experience in health and social care, either as a professional, volunteer, patient/service user or through any other involvement, identify an element of health or social care provision which could be improved. Perhaps there are failures in quality of patient care, simple issues that could be made better, or problems in the way that care is organised and delivered.

Critically analyse the underlying causes of this shortfall in care, and what works or does not work effectively. Consider the whole system of care, making sure you examine from the perspectives of policy, community, management, staff team, and patient/service user.

Propose some clear and achievable change that could improve the quality of care, clearly outlining how this would be implemented and how it could be evaluated. Make sure you address all of the learning outcomes in your writing. The essay must demonstrate your competence at critical evaluation, and in particular should critically analyse relevant theory, policy and practice, and include discussion of application/ implementation in a specific care environment.

This assignment gives you the opportunity to use the ideas and principles explored in the module and apply them to the reality of your experience. The intention is that you will be able to analyse the impact of leadership on the actual working of a service from the perspective of both the staff and service users involved.

Attachment:- Service Improvement and Integrated Care.rar