The article that appeared in the Nursing Times provides clear guidance on how to fully digitise the assessment of professional practice across a whole Health Sciences faculty. All students on the nursing, midwifery and allied health professional courses at the University of Southampton now use an e-Assessment of Professional Practice (eAoPP) tool.

If you want to know how they did it there is no better way to find out than to read the article appeared in the Nursing Times in 2015 and was written by the Project Managers, Pauline Morgan and Chloe Dyer.

The article shows that some of the potential barriers to adoption of such a system like access to computers and the internet were over stated. The site has been introduced without any need to supply computers or other devices.

The authors summarised the key success factors as follows;

• Stakeholders involvement
• Starting small and phased roll out
• Involvement of trust practice educators
• Student /staff education and dissemination
• Building capacity
• Just-in-time support
• Responding to feedback
• Collaborative working with contractor

The full article is available here.

The NET conference draws together nurses from across the world and we are delighted to again be exhibiting at the event.

We have had the opportunity to speak to delegates from Universities in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK and it is apparent there is a growing interest in the online assessment of professional practice. It is therefore great that we have been able to talk about the successful introduction of our online system at the Universities of Southampton, Bournemouth and Surrey. Delegates have been impressed by the way we have managed to reflect the particular approach to practice assessment at each University.

A number of the delegates have discussed their concerns with respect to an online system. They have expressed concerns about signatures and they have been reassured that every decision in the portfolio is date stamped and linked back to a specific user name and password, arguably making it more secure than paper. Some delegates have wondered about whether they will need to supply their students with devices and have pleased to hear that this was not required at any of the Universities we work with. Others have wondered about the challenges of Hospital firewalls and pleased to hear that this has always been overcome.