Specialist Practice - MSc/Postgraduate Diploma/Postgraduate Certificate

The course is designed to support practitioners in their specialist practice roles, and offers considerable flexibility. This allows you to choose from a range of optional modules from across the Faculty of Health and Applied Sciences to meet your own particular needs. You will be prepared for role changes and equipped with sophisticated negotiation and decision-making skills to manage the service as practice evolves.

All modules require you to use research in your field of practice. As such, you will be required to synthesise information and evidence from a wide variety of sources and utilise critical reflection skills in order to fully grasp the complex nature and context of contemporary specialist practice. You will also be required to complete a compulsory research methods module and a research dissertation.

Postgraduate Certificate 60 credits, of which 20 credits may be at level 3

• No core modules
• Optional modules

Postgraduate Diploma 120 credits, of which 40 credits may be at level 3

• Contemporary Issues in Advancing Practice (15 credits)
• Health and Social Care Research: Methods and Methodology (15 credits)
• Optional modules

MSc Specialist Practice 180 credits, of which 60 credits may be at level 3

• Contemporary Issues in Advancing Practice (15 credits)
• Health and Social Care Research: Methods and Methodology (15 credits)
• Dissertation (45 credits)
• Optional modules

MSc Specialist Practice (SPQ) 180 credits, of which 60 credits may be at level 3
Students undertaking the community pathway leading to the Specialist Practitioner Qualification (SPQ), have five years to complete the programme and are required to undertake a number of compulsory modules:

• Current Issues in Community Practice (20 credits)
• Health and Social Care Research: Methods and Methodology (20 credits)
• Synoptic module with or without V100 (Community Prescriber) (40 credits)
• Optional modules

Optional modules

A range of specialist practice and option modules have been developed specifically for this course that will help you meet the learning outcomes of the course in full.

See a full list of the available modules.

The University continually enhances our offer by responding to feedback from our students and other stakeholders, ensuring the curriculum is kept up to date and our graduates are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need for the real world. This may result in changes to the course. If changes to your course are approved we will inform you.

The emphasis of the learning and teaching will be student-centred, aimed at utilising the diversity of students' experience. A wide range of learning and teaching methods will be employed ranging from lectures to group work and discussion forums as well as independent study.

Strategies embedded within individual modules will foster collaborative working with opportunities for peer support, enabling you to focus on one of these specialist areas within an integrated framework. Some of the modules will use skills laboratories that provide you with additional opportunities to develop your skills and integrate theory with practice. Some modules will be delivered online but for the most part there will be a dynamic, blended learning approach in many modules.

For more details see our glossary of teaching and learning terms.

You have ownership of mapping out your own development through your choice of modules, which is supported by a wide ranging multi professional team from within the University and across local and national practice.