BA (Hons) Integrated Health and Social Care

We know that services for people are most effective when they are joined up and when health and social care professionals work together. It’s important to understand people’s physical health needs, their emotional needs and their social circumstances. This can help us to appreciate each person’s unique circumstances and work in joined up ways to find solutions.

Traditional health and social care roles are changing. There’s a shift towards partnership working across the health and social care sector including within social services, charities, the NHS and social enterprises. We’ve designed this course to help you work across these settings so you can have a positive impact on people’s lives.

You won’t simply learn the theory behind integrating health and social care, you’ll explore how it works in practice from working with service users to designing service provision. Topics might include how unevenly distributed resources across society affect a person’s life, how the support and care a person needs changes as they age or how to recognise a person’s strengths to make a difference to their life.

You’ll also explore global representations and perspectives of health and social care. Alongside lectures and seminars, you’ll work in small groups to solve problems set by employers such as developing ideas for community projects around homelessness, poverty and isolation.

On this three-year course, we prepare you for work across the health and social care sectors, both in the UK and globally.

Alongside lectures and seminars, you’ll work in small groups to solve problems set by employers such as local women’s charities, develop ideas for community projects, and produce digital resources (animations and digital stories) for agencies. This helps you to learn creative, decision-making skills and understand problems and solutions as they might happen when you’re working in the sector.

To give you as broad a range of experiences as possible, we organise practical simulations in our specialist space that represents a community flat and our home and hospital suites, as well as special projects with local organisations. You might work on a project helping women experiencing homelessness or be involved in a simulation where you have to deal with challenging behaviour in someone’s home.

We also organise educational visits to organisations such as Hulme Community Garden Centre and The Pankhurst Trust (incorporating Manchester Women’s Aid), and you can add to your skills with extracurricular activities like volunteering, first aid training, or learning British Sign Language.