School of Health and Care Professions

Dr Jason Oakley: My name is Jason Oakley and I'm the Head of School of the School of Health and Care Professions.

The School of Health and Care Professions is a school that encompasses a really wide range of professions that work both in the health and the social sector. So, for example, we train paramedics, nurses and both in adult mental health. We train radiographers, we have operating department practitioners and we have Physician Associates, as well as social workers. So we really do cover a really wide range of professional groups that will contribute both to health and social care.

A really fundamental part of these courses is the staff on them, in the main, are practitioners themselves. So these are people that have the same qualifications. They've been there, they've worked in the hospitals, and some will still do. They're there to support the students, both in their academic time here at the university, and that will be through pastoral support as well as academic support but also they're there to support them when they go into placement. So the actual staff are a really fundamental part of the experience for our students.

At the University of Portsmouth, we have all the normal facilities you'd expect from a university but we also have some of the most fantastic, what we call, simulation facilities. So these are areas which try to simulate what it will be like when you actually are there in a hospital. So we have ward areas, we have an operating theatre, we have an X-ray room. We have flats where you can just experience what it's like to be in somebody else's home. So we have a really wide range of facilities that allow us to actually give you an experience of what it's like.

But within some of those areas, we actually also have a lot of technology and that technology is there to make it seem very, very real. The training of our students during this time is just so important because they are the workforce of the future. It's about immersing you in all that simulated reality before you actually go out into work with real patients and real service users.

All of our courses will come with placement opportunities. They're absolutely essential. They're how you fill the requirements of the professional regulators but also how you begin to build up your experience, build up your knowledge over the period of your course to be able to give the best care, the best service to the patients and the service users that we work with.

Like most of the staff I'm actually from an NHS background myself and I'm a radiographer by profession. It makes me so proud to be part of the team that are training the workforce of the future. That's our students going through their training and getting ready to go out and become the carers of the future, working in both health and social care. So for me, this is just a fantastic job to do and it's reflected by the fantastic students that we have that then go on to work in these careers.