Healthcare Management MSc

Health and social care institutions (e.g. NHS) are continuously striving to improve themselves and attain excellence against a backdrop of relentless change. The ability to accept rapid and significant change as an inevitable consequence of life is a pre-requisite for organisational survival. We’ll cover the ability of organisations to adopt change rather than merely adapt to it as one of the major hallmarks of a learning organisation. You’ll discover how organisational learning becomes the mechanism by which organisational competencies can keep pace with national, local or international challenges. The development of whole-system change initiatives have become the cornerstone; the gold standard approach in managing complex change manifested through individuals who seek to improve service delivery.

Change is inevitable, and it is readily accepted that to remain the same increases organisational risk, however, applying change management strategies to complex and high challenge organisations can be a difficult yet essential task in today's pursuit of organisational efficiencies. You’ll explore change theory, strategic formation alongside organisational change, the application of advanced technologies and the resilience requirements of your organisation.

You’ll learn about leadership styles, emotional intelligence and will have the opportunity to learn about your own leadership traits and styles. Leaders predominantly create context and together we’ll explore the skills required to successfully mould and develop the context in a complex evolving environment.

We’ll examine the fitness of health and social care institutions to tackle urgent global issues. It consists of three elements: 1) effective decision making 2) adoption of a global approach, and 3) creation of a new business paradigm. We consider the related concept of 'MisLeadership', which looks at how leaders have often failed to achieve the optimum outcomes for those they lead.

Responding to the continuously changing nature of service design and redesign of health and social care systems. We’ll support you, as health and social care practitioners, to develop and extend your role for advanced practice as you prepare for more autonomous and more integrated organisational roles and functions. You’ll possess the knowledge and skills to take and implement complex decisions in a rapidly changing health and social care sector environment. As advanced practitioners, you’ll have the potential to contribute to the need for organisational transformations across the care sectors.

This is particularly important in advanced organisational practice, and we’ll encourage you to focus on new or advanced areas of service development for effective organisational decision making. You’ll need to be able to utilise both strategic and operational decision-making skills at an advanced level to accommodate national, and where relevant international, strategic intentions with local implementation needs and adjustments.

Disasters (e.g. floods and earthquakes), pandemics (e.g. COVID-19), major emergencies and many other situations and events cause disruptions to the operation of health and social care. These disruptions often reduce effectiveness and threaten health and social care continuity. Health and social care services are highly dependent on an interdisciplinary set of parameters such as infrastructure, management and human resources all of which are essential for the continuity of these critical services and demonstrate the complexity of these services.

We’ll equip you to assess and improve the resilience of your organisation. Responding to communities’ need for more effective and less interruptive health and social care services, by integrating resilience in the way the organisation operates. You’ll reflect on this complexity and the interdisciplinary nature of these services whether you are from medical, paramedical, military, engineering, or other backgrounds. You’ll specifically develop broad and detailed knowledge about the components of risks, disaster typologies, vulnerability assessment, emergency complexities and disaster response phases.

We’ll provide a framework, which’ll allow you to recognise the need for resilience, and to demonstrate capability to assess and address at least one of its key parameters that has the potential to affect the continuity of health or social care service.

Graduates of our MSc in Healthcare Management are typically professionals already working in health or social care who want to progress into mid-level and senior roles. With further training and experience, potential career paths include:

• Nursing Home Supervisor/Manager/Director
• Children's Home Supervisor/Manager/Director
• Supported Housing Care Supervisor/Manager/Director
• Social Worker (with additional training/registration requirements)
• Health Service Supervisor/Manager/Director
• Hospice Supervisor/Manager/Director

Choosing to study an MSc in Healthcare Management will give you many transferable skills; here are just some of them:

• Ability to initiate and manage change
• Develop strong leadership and decision making skills
• Strong teamwork across multi-disciplinary and inter-agency teams
• Critically reflect and the ability to apply research methods in practice

Once you become an ARU student you will be able to access our Employability Service to help you whatever stage your career, whether that’s landing your dream job or the next progression step.

We offer:

• careers advice, including one-to-one online and telephone appointments with our experienced advisers
• help with your CV, job searches, applications and interview preparation
• an online portal packed with useful careers resources
• our Employability Programme, which helps you hone the skills employers say they want in graduates.