True Collaboration?

Loughborough University London offers a wide variety of courses for Masters students in the fields of business and finance, enterprise, design, technology and creative industries to name but a few.

The Collaborative Project module is common to many of these programmes and succeeds in capturing a diverse cross-section of students to en

gage them in working through real-life business problems. Loughborough London have paired up with the NHS and tasked students to develop recommendations for some of the long-standing informational and organisational continuity problems in healthcare, namely those of access to the most appropriate urgent care services for patients and visibility of the most appropriate health information for patients.

Many of us who will have studied professional degrees, such as medicine or dentistry, were never afforded the opportunities to engage with project-based work of this kind. Some medical and dental schools have adopted the problem-based learning models of teaching but would not have actively encouraged collaboration with students from other subjects. But isn’t it important to equip future healthcare professionals with the skills to work in partnership with other organisations and experts in other fields? That way we can empower the workforce to design the healthcare services or products of the future from within. By fast-tracking students to clinical excellence could it be that our training is failing to shape the leaders and innovators of tomorrow? FC