UNISON Ulearn Northern Ireland

Targeted at: Members in the public and private health service and Ambulance service
Duration: 10 months over which you will attend six study skills sessions and eight K101 tutorials. Starts twice a year in October and February.

This is the updated replacement course for K100. The is a level 4 course which offers a broad foundation in health and social care. It gives a grounding in the knowledge, skills and understanding required in caring work of all kinds – paid or unpaid, voluntary or professional – and also explores the perspective of users of care services.

Blocks of learning include:

• Who cares? looks at the range of formal and informal care, exploring the diversity and sensitivity of care situations
• Working with life experience explores the impact of care needs and care services on people’s sense of identity and self-worth.
• Diverse communities and resources for care asks how a community can respond to the needs of different groups of people.
• People and places: contexts of care explores the settings where care takes place, exploring their physical, social and psychological impact and the extent to which they are enabling or disabling.
• Making care safer? examines how care can go wrong and what individuals can do to try to prevent this.
• The shaping of care services in the UK examines care policies at the national level.

This course will be supported by release from your employer, a UNISON Study Skills for K101 course and an exam preparation day. This course is first year university level, awards a stand alone certificate and contributes 60 credits towards a university degree. Previous participants on the course have included staff such as health care assistants, home care workers, staff from domestic services, admin, security, portering and catering staff. Some learners have used their study to help access places on the workbased nursing programme, others are working towards a degree and some just enjoyed the course itself. You can read more about how learners got on in the ‘Stories’ section of this website.

K101 is a stand-alone qualification, providing underpinning knowledge for NVQ Level 3&4 in Care, and is mapped to the Knowledge & Skills Framework. At the same time it prepares you for further study towards a diploma or degree. It is also a compulsory module in a number of OU diploma and degree programmes including Nursing, Social Work (not currently recognised in NI), BA in Health & Social Care and BA in Childhood and Youth Studies. The workbased pre-reg nurse training for adult, mental health and learning disabilities is delivered by the OU (adult and mental health), QUB (adult and learning disabilities), UU (mental health). This is only available through heath and social care trusts. If you already have the K100 or K101 course, you get an exemption for the first module of the OU pre-reg course.

UNISON offers this course in partnerhship with health and social care trusts. Contact Fidelma Carolan to find out when the next courses are available. 028 90270190 f.carolan@unison.co.uk