There are over 130,000 Allied Health Practitioners (AHPs) working across a range of sectors in the UK, contributing critical expertise in a number of care pathways. However, research from AHPs is known to lag behind nursing, medicine and clinical scientists resulting in a substantially lower evidence base to services and care compared with other professions.

Department of Health policy focuses on the need for greater innovation in health care delivery; requiring the development of intrapreneurial practitioners. Research and intrapreneurial activity are inextricably linked. Intrapreneurship is an individual intention or drive to innovate within an organisation, developing and implementing novel solutions to organisational problems often in a ‘bottom-up’ way.

The Centre for Health and Social Care Research at Sheffield Hallam University have utilised the opportunities of smartphone and tablet technologies to offer a flexible work-based learning programme to develop research skills of AHPs using a previously developed intrapreneurial pedagogy; focussing on learning by doing, learning from networking, learning from mentors/role models, learning from mistakes and learning through challenging tasks.

Mobile technology offers an opportunity to reach practitioners in the workplace allowing clinical situations of relevance to be documented with input from supervisors, mentors or user representatives in a timely manner, and making the issue of NHS firewalls no longer a problem for remote delivery.

Adopting a tri-partite agreement between the learner, their manager and the University based facilitator, the research centre have focussed on using the mobile technology to facilitate the development of outcomes that are more likely to meet managerial or departmental objectives and local service needs.

If you would like to know more about this pilot programme please contact the Centre for Health and Social Care Research at chscr@shu.ac.uk or 0114 225 5854.