Instilling confidence for future practice: Developing a professional culture around raising concerns via “Student Voice”.

To ensure students are adequately prepared for placements the School sought to instil confidence in raising concerns in a way that mirrors the way they would do within their future practice. For our students, this is within the clinical environment and we have specific requirements placed on us by the General Medical Council, but raising concerns is a professional responsibility across all disciplines. To reduce barriers for students, we developed a tool (“Student Voice”) co-designed with students in 2018/19 to provide a platform for them to raise concerns. The main purpose of ‘Student Voice’ was to provide an accessible and confidential system, and to improve school processes for recording, addressing, and monitoring concerns.

In this presentation we will talk about the barriers, enablers and lessons learned from the perspective of staff involved in the co-development and implementation of the system. We will talk about the challenges of implementing a system for anonymous and anonymised reporting, alongside how we’ve managed issues around confidentiality to build trust in the use of the system. The system also has the benefit of fostering confidence in their observation skills in clinical environments.

“Student Voice’ emulates the NHS National Whistleblowing Standards (2021). As future health professionals, students will be involved in quality assurance processes, providing constructive feedback as patient advocates and receiving feedback from patients and family/carers. We believe that this type of system would be of potential benefit in other Schools, where students need to feel part of a workplace-based culture in reporting concerns.