Leadership and management placement joint placement - Harry Reynolds

My name is Harry Reynolds, 4th-year physiotherapy student at University of Salford on the part-time course. I am currently completing a leadership and management placement in the Northern care alliance and Health Education England. During this placement, we have been working closely to with our educators to complete a number of small projects but the main one being an AHP support workforce planning toolkit.

Communication and workload planning have been some of the main skills I have been able to notice improve during this placement. As we’re communicating with individuals who even when qualified we wouldn’t often deal with, so gaining confidence talking to them over teams or communicating over email was something I didn’t expect to gain during this.

My project has been shared with another physio student on the placement, Michael, we've been collecting feedback about a new draft toolkit for support workers to find out if it was fit for purpose and what actions or changes we needed to feedback before it was released.

From this placement I will take away the understanding of what goes on behind the scenes, understanding a budget and the process of a project from a draft to a final piece. I think this will have a positive impact my career as I now have an understanding of the work that goes on and projects or surveys are created to improve areas of work and for our benefit as AHP’s.

Finally, some advice I would give to a student taking on a placement like this is to always get involved. All the meetings you go to are safe places and everyone is happy to hear from students and will always welcome your input. Also your educators will be very experienced individuals who you can learn from and pick their brains about any areas you may want to improve in, for me it was report writing and we were able to see examples and set some time aside for an introduction to this.