This unit is aimed at health and social care professionals undertaking advanced practice roles with a desire to articulate and develop professional thinking, reasoning and judgment. 

The unit helps you develop expertise in critical thinking and informs your judgement and decision making processes. It helps develop a more holistic understanding of the complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty that characterises complex professional practice. The teaching and reflective activities explore what critical thinking should achieve in advanced practice, patterns of thinking, practical reasoning and judgement making, the influences on thinking, raising awareness and developing understanding and skills. The focus throughout the unit and in the assessed work is on developing sound thinking strategies and processes to help ourselves and others in the environment we work in.

Key areas covered:

Normally students may enter Level 7 study if they have been awarded:

• Undergraduate degree (honours or non-honours)
• An equivalent qualification (the learning outcome of which are demonstrably appropriate in terms of knowledge, understanding and skills) equivalent to 120 credits at Level 6.

If you do not meet this criteria you are still able to apply for this unit but we may ask you to complete a study skills handbook to familiarise yourself with academic writing at masters level or pre-admission work. This will be sent to you when we have received your application form.

Fees and funding:

You will need to pay or indicate employer support of payment for unit or course fees to the university.

Applicants should contact their employing organisation for further details.

Pre-purchased places

The Faculty of Health & Social Sciences has contractual arrangements with NHS organisations, Local Authorities and the Pan-Dorset & Wiltshire Teaching Partnership for pre-paid places on specified modules. If you work within Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset or Hampshire and Isle of Wight you may be able to access the pre-paid places. These arrangements allow organisations to nominate the staff they wish to send on each unit or course.

The pre-arranged agreements allow individuals, such as yourself, a route to access appropriate professional development opportunities that are seen as strategically important to your organisation (in consultation with your Line Manager/Education Co-ordinator). All requests for pre-paid places must first be agreed by your organisation prior to completing an application.

Course review:

In order to take advantage of new approaches to learning and teaching, as well as developments in practice to benefit our students we regularly review all of our courses. This course is currently going through this process and we will update this page to give you full information about what we will be offering once the review process has concluded.  These changes will come into effect for all new students from September 2025. Applicants will be notified by our admissions team of any changes.