A project developed at Buckinghamshire New University is connecting postgraduate students in health and social care programmes, including nursing, social work and safeguarding, with service providers seeking to undertake service improvement evaluations. The Service Improvement Research and Evaluation Partnerships project was evaluated using participatory action research (PAR) and found that students gained a variety of skills through experiential learning and that service providers gained postgraduate-level evaluation from enthusiastic students with minimal staff input. This article describes the project and explains how it can assist service providers to complete robust evaluations, and help students to engage in 'live' evaluations in situ for experiential learning. It also details the PAR evaluation.
Keywords: Service improvement; education; experiential learning; problem-based learning; service evaluation; students.