New centre launched to pioneer integrated health and social care education

The Plymouth Integrative Health and Social Care Education Centre (PIHC) will enable students to learn with and from each other

Mrs Abi Kinsey

PIHC Project Administrator

Faculty of Health

30 September 2021

“Health and social care are all about teamwork, and teamwork requires us to learn together.”

A new centre has been launched at the University of Plymouth to enable students on health and social care courses to learn with and from each other.

The Plymouth Integrative Health and Social Care Education Centre (PIHC) was launched to bring together courses, staff and students from across the University’s Faculty of Health.

This interprofessional learning will be ‘engaging, enriching and, empowering’, ultimately aiming to lead to better outcomes for patients, clients and service users. Integrated learning will also help students to build successful careers, ensuring a strong team ethic in delivering patient centred care.

PIHC builds on work that has previously taken place across the Faculty, and will identify and build synergies between health professional training courses.

Professor Sube Banerjee, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Health at the University, said:

“Good health care is all about good teamwork, and improving teamwork requires us to learn together well so we work together well. It is absolutely down to us to use the breadth of skills and knowledge that we have in our six health schools to improve the health of the population. 

“To do that we will create a suite of interprofessional learning opportunities delivered at scale to all our students. This will bring them together in meaningful joint education and that will mean that we will produce the best health professionals possible; that’s what integrative approaches can do. PIHC will make Plymouth the ‘go to’ place for interprofessional education.”

The Director of PIHC, Dr Phil Gee, added:

“The best health and social care happens when doctors, dentists, nurses, health professionals, social workers, psychologists and more all work well together. PIHC will make that more likely by giving students greater opportunities to learn with and from each other.

“PIHC is embedded across the Faculty’s six schools, with an academic from each acting as PIHC’s interprofessional learning lead. By working together to develop joint learning, interprofessional education will become an integral part of every course. It’s a huge privilege for me to be the director of PIHC, and I am also fantastically lucky to be working with such a great team.”

PIHC will also build a wider team including patients, clients and service users, to help deliver its mission to facilitate better health and social care. The first of a series of timetabled sessions that bring together new undergraduates across the Faculty of Health will take place in December.

Email PIHC@plymouth.ac.uk or visit the PIHC webpage for more information.

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