Student voice

Contemporary healthcare within the UK is changing rapidly, further influenced by demographic change, an ageing population and increasing demand for emergency and urgent care services. This informs the need for ambulance clinicians to be educationally prepared and supported to work in a dynamic and agile sector, with a requirement for increasing knowledge, critical thinking, complex decision-making and the ability to work effectively with wider health and social care professionals within the integrated system.

This context challenges ambulance educators to continually develop, evolve and respond to a changing emergency and urgent care landscape. Ambulance education is diverse, presenting ambulance services with a challenge in evaluating true student experience and establishing the quality and effectiveness of education provision. Using the ‘student voice’ to continually monitor, evaluate and contribute to quality enhancement and improvement will be an important development.

Over the last few decades, the higher education system in the UK has developed a practice where stakeholder satisfaction is routinely measured. The tools used to monitor feedback range from surveys to focus group-style forums. Evidence suggests that higher education providers successfully use what they learn through the survey findings to enhance learners’ experience (Garwe, 2015). Case studies demonstrate a link between student evaluations and the quality of education programmes (Nair et al, 2010). How can we apply lessons learned from higher education to education provided by the ambulance sector? One area where we can improve is to enhance the way student voice is captured, analysed and used to improve courses. Barriers to achieving it include response rates, validity and reliability of the tools used and mechanisms allowing educators to respond to points made by students (Shah et al, 2017). The Department of Education at East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) proposes a transparent approach informed by experiences from the higher education sector, empowering students to improve ambulance education through constructive dialogue, engaging them in group feedback where learners feel empowered to be open and honest, allowing them to shape decisions and approaches to the education experience and process (Keane, 2005). Weekly forums have been established whereby learners have brief discussions with educators as the relevance, validity and impact of feedback can be lost if the process is delayed and, more importantly, if errors are not highlighted so improvements can be made (Schartel, 2012).