Interim Report

518545-LLP-1-2011-1-UK-ERASMUS-ECDSP

European Masters Degree in Clinical Movement Analysis (CMAster)

Project Number: 518545-LLP-1-2011-1-UK-ERASMUS-ECDSP

Grant Agreement: 2011-3958/001-001 Sub-programme or KA: ERASMUS

Progress Report Public Part

European Masters Degree in Clinical Movement Analysis


Project information

Project acronym: CMAster

Project title: European Masters Degree in Clinical Movement

Analysis

Project number: 518545-LLP-1-2011-1-UK-ERASMUS-ECDSP

Sub-programme or KA: ERASMUS

Project website: www.cmaster.eu

Reporting period: From 1/10/20122

To 28/2/2013

Report version: Version 1

Date of preparation: 15 April 2013

Beneficiary organisation: University of Salford

Project coordinator: Prof Richard Baker

Project coordinator organisation: University of Salford

Project coordinator telephone number: 0161 295 2465

Project coordinator email address: [email protected]

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. © 2008 Copyright Education, Audiovisual & Culture Executive Agency.



The document may be freely copied and distributed provided that no modifications are made, that the source is acknowledged and that this copyright notice is included.



Executive Summary

The CMAster project is a three year Erasmus Multilateral Project. It started in October 2011 and aims to develop the curriculum for a joint master’s degree programme in Clinical Movement Analysis to be delivered by the University of Salford, the VU Amsterdam and KU Leuven. Clinical movement analysis uses the same high technology approach used to capture the movements of actors to create animated movies to capture the movement of people with walking disabilities. Then information is used by a range of health professionals as a guide to prescribing treatment. There is a small but growing demand for health professionals specifically trained to perform movement analysis assessments and CMAster aims to establish a European programme of training and education at masters level to support them. There are just under 200 clinical movement analysis services mostly in hospitals across Europe. Health professionals employed in these services come from a range of professional backgrounds including physiotherapy, biomechanical engineering, human movement science, medicine and surgery, prosthetics, orthotics and podiatry. The primary objective is to develop a curriculum for a joint master’s degree in Clinical Movement Analysis and the secondary objectives to establish support services and an exploitation plan to implement this. The partners are three European Universities (Salford, VU Amsterdam and KU Leuven) with an established interested in education and research in this discipline area. VU Amsterdam has one of the largest faculties of Human Movement Science in Europe. KU Leuven is widely recognised as operating the most advanced clinical gait analysis services. The University of Salford is internationally renowned for its clinical biomechanics and Professor Baker has recently been appointed as the World’s first Professor of Clinical Gait Analysis. The approach adopted has focussed on documenting existing resources amongst the partners, comparing policies and procedures for development and delivery of academic programmes within the three Universities and working with the European clinical movement analysis community to define its education and training needs. In the second half of the project this information will be used to plan and develop educational provision suited to the needs of the community. The major outcomes so far have been a mapping of resources and policies and procedures of the three institutions (the Institutional Mapping Report) and a survey of the current status of clinical movement analysis within Europe (the European Status Report), a definition of the key competencies that clinical movement analysts should be expected to possess (and hence that the proposed master’s degree programme should deliver) and the specification of the curriculum to be delivered. The main finding of the project is that formal procedures for establishing joint programmes do not exist within any of the partner universities. The informal processes that are required are poorly defined and required protracted negotiation with a strong dependence on personal interpretation of institutional policy which can differ both between individuals and over time. Particular challenges for this project are that this is bottom-up initiative driven by an identified need in the user community



(rather than institutional policy) and that being in a niche field limits potential income in relation to the time investment required to overcome the administrative challenges. Both issues should be considered carefully by others contemplating similar projects. Current plans (subject to EU approval) are to adopt a two stage strategy towards the overall goal of a full joint master’s programme. The first is the development of parallel master’s degree programmes in clinical movement analysis at all three universities to commence by October 2014. The second is to develop a joint master’s programme to commence in October 2017. The University of Salford has already approved a programme to start in October this year which will serve as a pilot for this. Sustainability has been by exploiting the different strengths of partner universities. The programmes at Amsterdam and Leuven will draw heavily on existing courses from existing related programmes. Salford is utilising the university policy of internationalisation (outside Europe) to open the programme to a much wider market than would otherwise be possible. The project web-site can be found at www.CMAster.eu.

http://www.cmaster.eu/





Table of Contents

1. PROJECT OBJECTIVES .................................................................................... 8

2. PROJECT APPROACH ...................................................................................... 9

3. PROJECT OUTCOMES & RESULTS ............................................................... 10

4. PARTNERSHIPS .............................................................................................. 12

5. PLANS FOR THE FUTURE .............................................................................. 13

6. CONTRIBUTION TO EU POLICIES ................................................................. 14



1. Project Objectives

The primary objective is to develop a curriculum for a joint master’s degree in Clinical Movement Analysis and the secondary objectives to establish support services and an exploitation plan to implement this.

Clinical movement analysis uses the same high technology approach used to capture the movements of actors to create animated movies to capture the movement of people with walking disabilities. Then information is used by a range of health professionals as a guide to prescribing treatment. The is a small but growing demand for health professionals specifically trained to perform movement analysis assessments and CMAster aims to establish a European programme of training and education at masters level to support them.

The programme has a network of 20 “Associate Partners” drawn from the seven regional academic societies serving the user community, major equipment manufacturers and representatives of 11 clinical services distributed across Europe with a mix of established and newer services and including those from new member states. The partners have met annually at a satellite meeting to the European Society for Movement Analysis in Adult and Meeting annual conference. They have had a particular involvement in developing the Key Competencies document which is the foundation of our curriculum development work.

The new master’s programme will be the first one anyone in the world to address the specific needs of the clinical movement analysis community. A particular challenge is that staff working in clinical movement analysis services tend to have either a clinical or technical background whereas what is required is staff educated and trained across the full spectrum of competencies. Graduates of the new programme will be the first of a new generation purposefully trained as specialist clinical gait analysts.

This technical/clinical divide is a particular issue for management of services with few service managers possessing a full spectrum of knowledge. As the new CMAster cohort moves to more senior positions they will be in a much better position to implement services of the very highest quality.

The end user is, of course, the citizen who has difficulty walking. Recent estimates suggest that 10% of the population find it difficult to walk 400m and this will increase with the ageing population, rising obesity and falling levels of exercise. CMAster is equipping a new generation of European clinical movement analysts to deliver services to support this population.



2. Project Approach

A substantial part of the project so far has been gathering information and defining the most appropriate pathway to achieving our goals.

The familiarisation process is now complete and involved partner meetings at each of the three sites. These were used as an opportunity to cement relationships, promote the project within the various institutions and gather a range of information principally about existing resources and institution policies and procedures within which the programme will have to be developed.

A survey of European clinical gait analysis services was also conducted to define the pattern of service delivery across Europe and identify the training needs of the community. This was followed up with in depth teleconference with selected services and wider discussion at meetings of both the associate partners and an open stakeholder consultation at the annual meeting of the European Society for Movement Analysis in Adults and Children in Stockholm last year.

A consultative process has also been used to define the core competencies required of a clinical movement analyst in the emerging European environment. A preliminary draft was prepared at a focus group held in Amsterdam in June 2012. The draft has then been developed further through a similar consultative process to the European survey.

Curriculum development within the University of Salford has required developing a pedagogical basis for a work-based distance learning programme specifically developed to address the needs of those already employed within clinical movement analysis services. There has been a particular emphasis within this on strategies to engage students with the programme and develop their capacities to develop as independent learners capable of developing their knowledge base both within and beyond their period of study.

A database of stakeholders has been developed (over 250 contacts), through extensive web-searching and e-mail base enquiry within the user community. This database has been coupled to the CMAster web-site to form the primary mechanism for dissemination to the user community. The dissemination strategy identifies parallel pathways one aimed at key opinion leaders and the other at the grass roots community (see Section 5 below).



3. Project Outcomes & Results

The Project Management work package aims to “manage the project, its workplan and budget to ensure effective and efficient implementation leading to delivery of output to pre-agreed deadlines”. A Definitive Workplan (internal document, contact project manager) has been delivered and is being implemented. It took some time to appoint a specific and experienced project manager but this has now been achieved and markedly strengthened the project management strategy.

The Familiarisation work package aimed to “provide a framework for partners to start working together to understand the different environments and constraints in which they operate”. This has been achieved in full with the principal output being the Institutional Mapping Report (internal document, contact project manager) which documents those environments, potentials and constraints in the partner universities and serves as a key reference for the rest of the project.

The Curriculum work package aims “to develop the curriculum for the course and develop three modules to the point of testing”. This is ongoing but the first three deliverables European Context Report which documents the current status of clinical movement analysis within Europe, the “Key competencies” which identifies the competencies that any clinical motion analyst should attain, and the draft Curriculum have all been made available on the web-site. Although the work package aimed to simply pilot modules in the 2013-14 academic year a full programme will be offered by the University of Salford commencing in September 2013.

The Support Service work-package aims to “develop support services required to develop and deliver the course”. Preliminary planning for this has taken place but detailed work was only planned for the second half of the project.

The Stakeholder and Dissemination work package aims to “develop a network of stakeholders and ensure European presence by active involvement in planning and regular reports on progress”. The network of Associate Partners listed in the original proposal has been consolidated at two meetings (Vienna 2011, Stockholm 2012) and have given feedback on project progress. A more general directory of stakeholders includes all directly relevant national and regional academic societies and is estimated to give at least 80% coverage of European clinical movement analysis services and of European manufacturers of movement analysis products and is available through the project web-site. An open stakeholder consultation was held in Stockholm in 2012.

The Quality Assurance aims “to assure the quality of the project and of the Master’s programme”. This has been achieved by the appointment of an experienced external evaluator who has provided valuable formative and summative feedback on project proposal. His first report has now been posted on the web-site. A Quality Assurance Framework has also been published (see web-site) describing the quality assurance structures in place at each University and for the new parallel programmes. A section describing how quality of the proposed joint programme will be assured will be the result of ongoing consultation.

The on-line collaboration work package aims “to develop tools for on-line collaboration to support both the development of the project and the delivery of the master’s degree programme”. Technological developments have rather over-taken this work package as more and more tools for on-line collaboration have become



available. On-line collaboration has been conducted with a wide range of tools including Skype, Adobe Connect, Elucidate (within Blackboard/Toledo) and DropBox. Regular (monthly) steering group teleconferences are now being held. A common virtual learning environment (VLE) for the Programme is being developed within Blackboard/Toledo which will interface with existing local VLEs.

The Exploitation work package aims “to ensure that the progamme developed is financially viable and sustainable and that the benefit of the project to the wider community clinical community is maximised”. Although activities within this work package where originally scheduled for the second half of the project significant preliminary work has been undertaken to ensure sustainability. This has focussed on ensuring that development plans exploit different potential within the partner universities including coordination with existing programmes at VU Amsterdam and KU Leuven and working within the Internationalisation Agenda (within and outside the EU) at the University of Salford.

A proposal for an amendment to the project’s overall aims is being submitted along with this report. The modified aims are to develop three parallel degree programmes (one at each of the Universities) to commence by October 2014 along with an agreed and definitive plan for a full joint programme to commence in 2017. This will allow more student choice (through differences between the programmes offered at the different universities), be more sustainable while the market is assessed (by allowing programmes to be more closely aligned with existing provision and potential within the different universities, and ensure more timely development of the curriculum (by separating that process from the administrative and governance issues surrounding the partners negotiating how the joint programme will be implemented).



4. Partnerships

The partners are three European Universities (Salford, VU Amsterdam and KU Leuven) with an established interested in education and research in this discipline area. VU Amsterdam has the one of the largest faculties of Human Movement Science in Europe. KU Leuven is widely recognised as operating the most advanced clinical gait analysis services and Prof Desloovere has been instrumental in developing the premier international short course (3 days) in clinical movement analysis with leading institutions in the United States. The University of Salford is internationally renowned for its clinical biomechanics and has Professor Baker who has recently been appointed as the World’s first Professor of Clinical Gait Analysis. The lead partners at each institution were well known to each other before the project and these relationships have been consolidated through the project. This has been complemented by other with specialist expertise such as Kirsten Bijker, (Education Director, Faculty of Human Movement Science), Stijn Van Laer (Audio-Visual and New Educational Technologies, Leuven).

The project is embedded within the European movement analysis community. The partners are all respected leaders of that community (Prof Harlaar is currently President of the European Society for Movement Analysis in Adults and Children). The Associate Partner network has created formal links with regional and national academic societies and clinical services and industry across the EU. The network of partners is strongest in the larger more establish states but extends to new member states. This reflects the current status of clinical movement analysis within Europe and is likely to be an important stimulus for progressing the field particularly within the developing states.

There is strong support for the CMAster initiative with in the Clinical Movement Analysis community across Europe both for what it can achieve directly through its provision of education but also through its potential to reinforce links across that community through encouraging staff mobility through clinical placements and internships.

Perhaps the biggest added value of working with multi-country partnerships is the establishment of a critical mass for educational provision in this area. It is a niche professional specialisation and educational provision within any single country would not be economically viable. It is only through working at a multi-country level that progress in this area is possible at all.



5. Plans for the Future

A proposal to slightly amend the aims of the project has been lodged with the EU. If accepted then future plans will be to establish parallel masters programmes in Clinical Movement Analysis in each of the partner universities to be launched by September 2014 (the programme at the University of Salford is already accepting students to start in September 2013). Pilot modules of the VU Amsterdam and KU Leuven programmes will also operate during the coming academic year.

A full joint programme is planned to commence in September 2017. A formal plan documenting in detail how this is to be achieved will continue to be developed and will be completed by the end of this project. Ongoing work will focus on:

Agreement on detailed administrative and quality assurance framework

Detailed specification of curriculum

Piloting of an appropriate virtual learning environment

Development of definitive plans for sustainability and exploitation

This work will progress alongside work to further emphasize links with the European clinical movement analysis community through the stakeholder community to ensure maximum relevance of products to that community and ensure that dissemination penetrates to every clinical movement analysis service in the continent.

The dissemination strategy identifies two parallel pathways. The first is to identify key opinion leaders within the community and tailor targeted dissemination activities towards them. A major focus will be events at the coming meetings of the European Society of Movement Analysis in Adults and Children in Glasgow (2013) and Rome (2014). The other pathway will use the stakeholder database to disseminate information to the grass roots user community. A selection of learning resources developed to support the project will be made open access and appropriately publicised to increase traffic on the project web-site. Teaching and learning activities include the creation of rich content in the form of Wikis and other written and video resources which will also be made available under a creative commons licence through the web-site.



6. Contribution to EU policies

This project arose from a consideration of the changing needs of the healthcare workforce as envisaged Health and Social Services: Comprehensive sectoral analysis of emerging competences and economic activities in the European Union (2009). This identified Health Associate Professionals (HAPs) as the fastest growing professional group and “technical knowledge to guarantee state-of-the-art services” as their primary requirement. Increasing specialisation across multi-disciplinary domains poses a specific challenge. Key recommendations of New Skills for New Jobs: Action Now (2010) were that we need to “make education and training more flexible and more open for innovation and enhance relationships between skills providers and employers” and “establish skills-based qualifications”.

Clinical movement analysis is a particularly good example of such an emerging high technology field within healthcare and the CMAster project is thus directly addressing these policy objectives. By nature new and emerging technologies within health care tend to be niche activities and the CMAster project will have a wider role in establishing a model for educational provision to support development in unrelated areas but which have similar characteristics.

Whilst joint degrees are important instruments for implementing the objectives set out in the Bologna Declaration and Prague Communiqué it is clear from our experience that individual higher education institutes are less enthusiastic about their implementation than are the European authorities. Our experience is that this is particularly challenging for smaller programmes aimed at small user communities which cannot guarantee institutions substantial return on investment. This is a particular concern given that one of the potential strengths of joint programmes must be to deliver specific educational provision to small user communities that would not be viable at national level. The experience of this consortium in pushing this particular proposal though to a full joint programme will thus contribute to realising the full potential that joint programmes within Europe have to offer.

Documents

Interim Report