Teaching and assessment for Design for Healthcare MSc

You’ll be taught through:

• lectures and seminars
• workshops
• practical classes and studio-based activities
• talks or workshops by invited guest speakers
• work based learning or placement (elective)
• group and individual tutorials

Some of your learning will also take place in a ‘real world’ setting such as a hospital, care home, local or national government department, engaging with stakeholders to enable you to gain a deep understanding of challenges that people in healthcare are experiencing.

At key stages, stakeholders or interested parties from healthcare would be involved in commenting on work.

You will also have the opportunity to select to undertake, in the final semester, a Placement or (if you are already employed in the healthcare sector) a work-based learning experience.

Assessment will be through the completion of any coursework integral to each module. Coursework may include:

• practical design
• project work
• reflective essays
• written assignments
• reports
• dissertation
• oral presentations

The are no written examinations associated with this course.

Semester 1

Design Thinking: Insights to Innovation (20 credits)

This module aims to accelerate your learning around Design Thinking, co-designing and innovation, enabling you to fast-track a shared studio community that will build a common platform for understanding your journey through the remainder of their programme.

Health, Care & Wellbeing Contexts (20 credits)

This module will introduce key concepts within the healthcare sector in various UK and global contexts to provide opportunities to experience, question and debate the nature of health, wellbeing and healthcare, locally and globally.

Service Prototyping (20 credits)

The aim of this module is to give you a deep understanding of the principles of service design and prototyping frameworks in order to drive forward ingenuity and innovation in healthcare.

Semester 2

Immersive Research Project 1 (20 credits)

You will be connected into healthcare settings to develop deep insights into these settings, identify the challenges and needs of the healthcare sector and develop responses to these challenges; these may range across products, textiles, spaces, service design, systems design, digital and technological responses.

Changing Populations (20 credits)

You will learn about the human lifespan and their changing capabilities and experiences in the context of design and/or health. You will also be introduced to different user research methods and ethical considerations to help understand and empathise with the people for whom you are designing. You will work on a project which involves engaging deeply with individual healthcare stakeholders and/or communities employing the knowledge and skills you learn during the module.

Leadership & Change (20 credits)

This module aims to develop leadership skills within a practice context, including developing understanding of organisational culture and a range of leadership models and theories. It also explores change management, as a key component of leadership in health and social care.

Summer semester

Immersive Research Project 2: Studio Practice

This module aims to enable you to apply the skills you have gathered in the previous modules and to build on the research developed in Immersive project 1 to develop a fully formed response to a healthcare challenge.

Dissertation

This module aims to develop your knowledge and understanding of research or work-based project methodology. It will support you in developing critical thinking, and enable you to utilise and apply a methodology within your own area of interest or practice.

Masters Placement

This module will enable you to contextualise the theories, principles and concepts learnt during your Masters programme and apply these in a real world setting. You will practice you skills within a professional environment, and experience how this knowledge can be applied in the field within which you are working.

Work-based Skills & Innovative Practice

(for students who are already working within a healthcare context)

The module aims to provide you with the opportunity to gain academic credit through learning applied in a variety of settings. The module will enable you to identify your learning needs and negotiate learning to develop skills or strategies that aim to push boundaries and pioneer change in the workplace to improve effectiveness and outcomes in your organisations. This could include service users and / or carers, teams, customers, clients and /or yourselves.