North West collaborative project developing an e-learning resource: Learning about health visiting

The changing face of health-care training means that higher education institutions need to be able to respond by adopting innovative approaches to health-care education (Walsh, 2011). Increased recruitment to specialist community public health nursing-health visiting programmes is having an impact on the availability for pre-registration placements in this area of specialist practice. NHS North West contacted the University of Cumbria to lead a project involving education providers to develop and enable online delivery of a health visiting learning resource in support of pre-registration programmes. The resource aimed to enable students to work through specific scenarios developed from the Healthy Child Programme (Department of Health (DH), 2009) and the Call to Action (DH, 2011), reflecting the new service delivery model. Through multimedia simulation and narrative pedagogy, focused around the virtual community of Stilwell (Walsh, 2011; Walsh and Crumbie, 2011), the resource design made full use of visual imagery of health visiting in action, ensuring formative assessment of students' knowledge acquisition and reflection on the context of health visiting in current student placements.