Our facilities
The state-of-the-art facilities in the Faculty enable you to hone your skills by getting hands-on experience. Purposely designed to meet your learning needs, the facilities will enable you to develop your skills in real-life simulated scenarios in a safe environment.
Nursing
Our nursing students are taught by the Simulated Learning and Clinical Skills Team within clinical, community and practice health settings.
The facilities at our Nursing Simulated Learning and Clinical Skills Centre include a simulated ward area. This includes a medication room and clinical classrooms, one of which has an immersion suite for fully-immersive simulated learning scenarios in different settings. The areas are set up with an audio-visual system so skills and simulations can be recorded for group debrief and self-assessment.
Within our facilities, students take part in award-winning innovative simulations with role players and full body manikins. These provide unprecedented opportunities to acquire, develop and maintain the knowledge, skills, values and behaviours needed for safe and effective patient care.
Education
Our education building houses a number of teaching rooms, set up to replicate actual classrooms. Classrooms are subject based, for example art rooms or science labs. Each room is equipped with all the relevant facilities you will need to practise your lessons before taking them into school.
You'll have access to our outdoor learning environment. Here, trainee teachers lead curriculum-linked natural sciences activities with children. It includes a specially built 'cubby house', outdoor pond, beehive and nature trail.
Our library (the Nightingale Centre) has an excellent range of teaching resources to help you plan and teach your lessons. These resources include a range of children's topic books, music and nursery rhymes on CD, as well as artefacts and kits that can be used to illustrate historical periods, different religions, science, maths and music.
Social work
Our skills lab is a purpose-built facility where social work students have the opportunity to learn and practise key social work skills.
The skills lab allows you to develop your assessment and intervention skills and other skills such as mentoring, teaching and providing reflective supervision in a real-life setting. It has been designed to be a multi-functional space which can be changed according to the simulated activities required.
The skills lab is divided into several sections including:
- a seminar/case conference room for a maximum of 20 people
- a simulated living-room and front door to assist in developing skills relating to home visits
- five interview rooms simulating work environments
- a control room with two-way mirror and viewing monitors
- all rooms have fitted cameras and microphones so that activities can be recorded
Midwifery
Our Kingston Hill campus offers you modern facilities and includes well-equipped laboratories where you can practise within a safe environment. Our new simulation suite houses all the equipment needed to develop clinical practice skills.
This versatile space can be used for simulated home settings or a delivery suite setting. It also has a range of equipment, including a birthing pool, birthing mattresses, manikins, Resuscitaires and exercise balls for you to learn with.
Forensic science
Our forensic science students have access to the scene-of-the-crime house. This enables students to gain real-world practical experience using both specialist equipment and precise techniques to obtain and preserve samples and evidence from the scene of a crime. The facility is a real semi-detached house, located on-site at Penrhyn Road campus. Its five rooms contain mock crime scenes, including burglary, arson, assault and sexual crime. Students have to pick up evidence carefully and transport it back to the labs for preservation and analysis. Even the garden contains evidence and is used by the forensic team's archaeologist for teaching.
In addition to this we have a crime laboratory for trace evidence analysis and state-of-the-art analytical equipment for the detection of legal and illegal drugs of abuse.
We have also developed our own brand-new DNA analysis laboratory which allows students to analyse biological samples and determine DNA profiles. All students gain in-depth expert witness training, including mock courtroom cross-examination at Kingston Crown Court.
Nutrition kitchen
Our modern nutrition kitchen is a dedicated space that has been designed to the latest specifications. It is a flexible and inviting teaching space which we use for food science practicals, research projects and student nutrition society events along with small group teaching (e.g. assignment and revision tutorials) and personal tutor meetings.
Exercise physiology and biomechanics laboratories
Our exercise physiology laboratory has sophisticated equipment that allows us to measure the physiological responses to exercise, such as: oxygen consumption, fat oxidation, heart rate, blood pressure and haematological responses, along with facilities to assess these in alternate environmental conditions through use of our altitude and heat chambers. We have a number of ergometers (e.g. treadmill, cycle, rowing kayak) for analysing sports-specific performance.
Practical work helps you develop your understanding of exercise physiology and your practical skills. The high specification equipment ensures a high quality of research and allows staff to provide support services to top-class athletes from a range of sports.
A large biomechanics laboratory provides space for teaching, research and consultancy activities. Here, we can accurately analyse sporting movements and skills using force platforms embedded into the floor, a nine-camera motion analysis system, surface electromyography and an isokinetic dynamometer.
