The University of Worcester has partnered with Solutionpath to support the wellbeing of its pre-registration nursing associate students and midwives.

The University of Worcester has been educating nurses and midwives for more than 25 years, with more than 1,200 students currently studying across the University’s Nursing, Midwifery and Nursing Associate programmes. In July 2020, Worcester was granted the largest allocation of additional health training places in the country, with an extra 240 places for nursing and 70 places for midwifery.

Jenny Pinfield, Principal Lecturer in Nursing at University of Worcester, said: “Throughout the pandemic, we have been putting strategies in place to increase nursing student support. StREAM is another vital tool in our toolkit – it can help us offer that crucial support to students and help us recognise if there are any issues and enable us to act swiftly.”

Solutionpath’s StREAM provides early identification of students potentially at risk of withdrawal and aids the management and reporting of targeted interventions. Its dashboard translates complex transactional data into a simple visualisation of student engagement. Academic staff can quickly view a summary of their students’ engagement data to enable more proactive and personalised outreach.

Elaine Swift, Head of Digital Learning and Teaching at University of Worcester, added: “We want to support students to ethically engage with their own learner data and to use that in conjunction with our staff. This initiative is a great opportunity for us to meet the needs of our nursing and midwifery students. Initial student feedback has been positive, and staff have found the system very easy to navigate.”

The StREAM platform uses a unique algorithm to collate student data that represents engagement in their academic learning and creates a universal measure of engagement – providing each student with an engagement score.

With StREAM, the University of Worcester can now easily visualise engagement at a cohort, course, module, or individual level and activate intervention in a near real time, allowing them to be more personalised, proactive, and supportive.

“At a time when more nurses are needed than ever before, the pandemic presents a heightened risk to progression unless we provide intervention,” said David Cole, Chief Commercial Officer, Solutionpath. “The University of Worcester is providing a unique approach to understanding student engagement and will be able to easily identify students most ‘at-risk’. StREAM will allow the University to spot early warning signs so they can respond quickly and improve the student journey.”

Onboarding and implementation commenced at the University of Worcester in September 2021, with the aim of going live by March 2022.