Gain hands-on experience of working with patients and use the industry-standard equipment in our Pharmacy and Biomedical Science Teaching Centre
Our Pharmacy and Biomedical Science Teaching Centre is a multi-purpose space equipped to simulate a clinical environment for you to practise the skills required to diagnose and help people manage illnesses and diseases – in a safe, supervised environment.
Discover our facilities
Students and staff at the School of Pharmacy and Biomedicine talk about the outstanding facilities they have to use during their research and studies.
The facilities here at the University of Portsmouth are really cutting edge. We have a lot of technology and lots of hands on equipment that get you ready for when you go out into the working world. We do some collaborative learning that’s involving things like collaborative microscopy, putting microscopic images on big screens and getting them to talk about them and understand what they mean.
We have the mannequins so we can treat them and we have heads so you can look in otoscopes. We offer inhaler techniques so they can explain to patients how to use their asthma inhalers. We give them the option to practice blood pressure monitoring, we have simulated arms and the students practice the use of blood pressure monitors on those arms.
When they’re safe and competent they can do it on each other. In every unit we have a practical or an experiment that we do. All of the lecturers make sure that the experiments that we do will give us some kind of skill, that they know we can use later on in a different area of our career.
We give students the opportunity to have a practical engagement in addition to undertaking the theory behind it.
Courses
If you're a student on our MPharm (Hons) Master's degree course, you'll use the centre to practise advising patients, dispensing medicines and making physical assessments in order to become a registered pharmacist.
If you're following the PgCert Prescribing and Therapeutics course, you'll be able to use this facility to improve your physical assessment, counselling and consultation skills.
Students on our BSc (Hons) Biomedical Science course can engage in collaborative microscopy. The teaching centre is a flexible space so it facilitates small-group collaborative learning for all undergraduates using it, including those on the BSc (Hons) Pharmacology course.
Spaces and equipment
The centre has capacity for 70 students and contains 8 consultation rooms.
The area can be split into 2 separate spaces – each with 4 consultation rooms – to accommodate 36 and 34 students respectively. There are 22 bays where you can practise dispensing medicines to patients.
Equipment and resources in the teaching centre include:
- 14 beds where you'll carry out mock cardio-vascular, musculoskeletal, neurological and respiratory assessments with instruments such as stethoscopes – for listening to the body's internal sounds – and tuning forks to assess a patient's hearing
- 12 training arms on which you can practise taking a patient's blood pressure
- 14 microscopes with digital pads, which transmit a magnified image from the eyepiece onto large screens for analysis
- 8 ear diagnostic training devices, which allow you to practise looking into the ear canal using an otoscope to check for various conditions
- 10 injection training devices, which enable safe practice of using needles on patients
- 2 spirometers for measuring the movement of air into and out of the lungs
- 4 Smoke Check meters for measuring the concentration of carbon monoxide on the breath
- A range of measurement devices for blood pressure, blood oxygen level, body mass index and temperature
- Stocks of medicines that you'll use for dispensing practice
- Online patient medical record system, for use in the dispensing bays but which you can also access remotely for off-site practice
- 55 Chromebook laptop computers, with a further 50 available in the Faculty of Science and Health
- 12 iPads for filming your mock consultations
- 2 Clevertouch presentation screens (75-inch), one in each half of the area, which can be used independently or stream to selected other screens
- Kramer VIA GO advanced presentation device that gives iOS, Android, Chromebook, PC and Mac users wireless connectivity with the Clevertouch screens
- 12 presentation screens, 42/43 inches in size
- Public address system with induction loop for hearing aid users
- 3 dedicated technicians, who can provide support in setting up and using equipment in addition to carrying out maintenance
Where to find us
Pharmacy and Biomedical Science Teaching Centre
Second Floor, St Michael's Building
Faculty of Science and Health
University of Portsmouth
White Swan Road
Portsmouth
PO1 2DT