EHS Faculty Teaching Excellence Award

The clinical skills team comprising Mairead Moloney, Dr Liz Kingston and Dr Kevin Johnson were awarded the EHS Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in Pedagogic Support 2023.

The clinical skills team provide excellence in pedagogical support in the Department of Nursing and Midwifery. Operationally, the team provide a range of pedagogical supports e.g., facilitating the integration of clinical skills pedagogies across the curricula, developing, and supporting objective structured clinical examinations (OSCE) and providing audio-visual/technical support. Examples of excellence in pedagogical support provided by the clinical skills team include clinical skills pedagogy support clinics, facilitation of staff training and upskilling, and creation and maintenance of teaching support resources online.

The team works collaboratively with both staff and students and are continuously seeking input and feedback on advancing clinical skills pedagogic support to meet discipline specific issues and needs as they arise. During the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated teaching restrictions the team was particularly impactful in addressing emergency contingency planning measures that ensured ongoing excellence in pedagogic support and service provision despite the public health restrictions in place. The team led the implementation of alternative approaches to ensuring the provision of essential clinical skills teaching during the pandemic and some of these approaches have been sustained in programme delivery for example a clinical skills online teaching platform and simulation pedagogy. Strategically, the team contribute to curriculum development and innovation and have led enhancements and improvements to the clinical skills environment and resources.

Strategic leadership was provided by Dr Liz Kingston in learning and teaching innovation excellence through the formalisation of simulation pedagogy within the departments’ undergraduate programmes, supported by competitively secured funding awarded by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education on two occasions in 2020 and 2021 via the Strategic Alignment of Teaching and Learning Enhancement Funding (SATLE) Awards. The wider project team within the department formalised simulation pedagogy, an internationally recognised benchmark of excellence in clinical skills pedagogy, to support final year students in their transition to the clinical internship component of their BSc programmes.

The team supported module leaders in the design, development and implementation of simulation-based learning experiences, tailored to the needs of the students and aligned with programme outcomes. Following positive evaluation by staff and students, the project team further developed the pedagogy and scaled up to wider utilisation and roll-out of simulation-based education across year one to four of BSc Nursing and BSc Midwifery programmes.

The clinical skills team was nominated for the University of Limerick Teaching Excellence Award in Pedagogic Support 2023.