Axia Digital is again sponsoring the annual NET networking for education and health care conference being held at Churchill College, Cambridge.

The conference is the first one to take place since the launch of the new Nursing standards and there are several presentations highlighting the work of the pan area groups, which are now developing regional practice assessment documents across the country.

Creating pan area assessment documents based on the pan London document now appears to be a given. Indeed, there is momentum to create a national document. Several partnerships are also planning to have a digital version of the new assessment document(s) when they are finalised.

The session on ‘Partnership Working’ at the conference demonstrated how much progress had been made with pan area projects. It is a major step forward that nurse practitioner and academics are taking control of the process of introducing the new standards rather than having the process dictated to them.

It also highlighted some of the opportunities that would be presented by having a comprehensive data set of assessment practice, that would be easier to access and review because it was online. There was a commitment at the workshop to not only replicate the paper document but to explore innovative approaches to assessment.

Some of the challenges were also acknowledged. Various presenters made a plea to ensure that there was a consistency with respect to the roles of those involved in assessment. In our experience this is particularly necessary for academic staff, who are often caught between the demands on them from their host Universities and their students/mentors. Digital assessment potentially provides an answer because it does reduce the time checking portfolios, as well as enabling those portfolios to be accessed throughout the year. However, those benefits are only delivered if there is clarity about the role of what is to be called the academic advisor.

Chris Peat our Customer Services Director who is attending the conference comments,

‘It is great to hear how partnerships are being established across the UK. We welcome these developments and we are here to let Universities know that we can support whatever approach to digital assessment that they decide to adopt, whether it be as individual university, as part of an area-based pan assessment group or a mixture of both.’

A number of workshops took place over the central band of the UK last week. In addition to the Universities who attended, the workshops also prompted other Universities who were unable to attend to organise individual meetings. The company has therefore a busy schedule of meetings arranged for the New Year.

An additional workshop will also be held on Monday 23^rd January 2017 between 1.00 p.m. and 3.30 p.m. at the Executive Suite, Oxford Brookes University. Lunch will be provided, the event is FREE and there are no restrictions on the numbers attending from each University.

Universities who attended the workshops last week fed back that they found it useful to discuss the key issues involved in transitioning from paper to electronic portfolios and discovering the way these had been addressed at Southampton; Bournemouth and Surrey Universities. All these sites have now moved from a pilot to a full implementation and there are now over 11,500 active users at Southampton University.

The focus of the sessions was and will be on;

• Enhancing the user experience
• Accessing the sites
• Institutional Benefits
• Project Implementation

It was apparent that a number of Universities consider that revalidation provides an ideal opportunity to make this transition from paper to electronic portfolios.

If you want to book a place(s) at the workshop or arrange an individual meeting please contact our Customer Services Director Chris Peat by email chris@axia.email or phone him on 07771 996620.

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.