The trials and tribulations of setting up a development worker post at the University of Huddersfield

In his report, ‘High Quality Care For All’, Professor Lord Darzi talks of his dedication
to ‘improvingly continuously the quality of care’, ‘personalised care’ and ‘creating
new partnerships between the NHS, Universities and Industry’. These, and many
other challenges faced by the 21st Century NHS are strongly supported by the
involvement of Service Users and Carers (SU&C) in both the initial education and
continuous professional development of health and social care professionals. This
paper will explain how SU&C involvement is becoming embedded at the University
with the creation of a development worker post.
At the University of Huddersfield, Teaching, Learning and pedagogy has had a high
profile; alongside this courses for health and social care professionals have always
had strong elements of work based learning; and now there is the additional need to
look at the ‘customer’ dimension by embedding the involvement of SU&C’s in
education.
SU&C’s have been involved in courses at Huddersfield for a number of years, with
initial work limited to small group of enthusiasts working independently primarily in
Social Work and Mental Health. The ALPS (Assessment and Learning in Practice
Settings) CETL (Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) provided the
opportunity to support and pump prime work in this area by supporting a 2 year parttime
secondment for an academic project lead.
Throughout the ongoing secondment the Academic Lead spent time identifying what
needed doing, and mapping existing process and potential projects. It soon became
apparent that there was much work to be done with limited time and resources. In
particular to provide the support that SU&C’s, Academics and partners needs can
be time consuming. But to not do it properly verges upon ‘tokenism’ and can have
negative impact for those involved. The academic lead was convinced that to really
make a success of SU&C involvement, a development worker post needed to be
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created. This was supported by evidence from the Nursing and Midwifery Council
QA Audit of April 2009, ‘Outstanding in Service User and Carer Involvement’ and
the external validation of the new nursing curriculum in September, 2008 also
described as ‘outstanding’ in this field.
This paper will discuss the complex process followed in order to secure the post and
outline some of the challenges that the Development Worker found in the early
months of the post.