By Adam Hodgson
The Importance of work based experiences:
A key strategic priority for the Institution is to “ensure every student is provided with opportunities to gain work-based and/or work-orientated experience” such as work placements. Work placements not only enhance the employability of students to a particular industry, but they can also help students to make more informed choices about their future careers and help foster a more positive and fulfilling experience at University.
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The Julia Garnham Centre
In 2021, the Julia Garnham Centre (JGC) was established in the School of Biosciences. The Centre is an NHS badged genomics facility, run as an equal partnership between the University of Sheffield and the Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. The JGC aims to equip students with key genomic-analytical skills used across diagnostic industries in the UK and overseas, to boost their employability and help them to understand the sector (molecular pathology), which has poor visibility and reach across undergraduate and postgraduate communities. To encourage high level learning and help students to achieve professional “competence” we adopted a strategy similar to the “Theory of Self Determination” (R M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, 2020). We nurtured an environment where students felt comfortable and connected to others and valued. This was key to ensuring that students volunteered their time and enthusiasm to engage with our digital learning materials, which taught them the principles of genomic-healthcare analysis pipelines and processes.
We also created placements to provide opportunities for students to apply these principles to live clinical scenarios to develop high level ability and professional competence through experience. Key to ensuring students engaged with this activity robustly and reliably, we made students “partners” in our clinical impact strategy and showcased their impact. This was a powerful strategy that provided students with a strong sense of ownership, and developed confidence and independence, all of which reinforced their learning, sense of community and helped the JGC to achieve its clinical impact goals. This work has attracted institutional awards in the past 12 months, including a Knowledge Exchange Impact Award (Health, Wellbeing and Welfare), an Education Award for Leadership, and the Chancellor’s Medal for one of our top students.
The JGC will provide over 250 NHS work placements this year from our campus facility, which is staffed by a team of 20 geneticists from the Sheffield Children’s and academic staff from Biosciences. Our diagnostic placements are mainly available to UGT, PGT and PGR students from across Biosciences, as well as other departments. In addition to these opportunities, we are also excited to offer scientific writing placements with an international charity called Unique, who provide networking and information support services to patients across the world living with intellectual disability and developmental delay rare genetic diseases. These placements will provide our students with wrap-around medical-writing and editorial support from Sheffield Children’s Clinicians and communication experts from Unique, to publish their work, and thus provide direct informative support to patients living with some of the rarest genetic disorders. Our students will then have the opportunity to meet some of the patients they helped.
Since our establishment in 2021, we have grown the number of placement opportunities from 10 per year, to over 200, making us one of the largest providers of healthcare placements in the UK, and the largest provider of genomic placements in Europe (as far as we can tell!). We have plans and resources to increase our capacity to 400 per year, and share our practice to establish other centres, which together with year in industry opportunities through the School of Bioscience, will create placement opportunities for all students.
Dr Adam Hodgson is a Senior Lecturer in Genetics at the School of Biosciences.