Mrs Kimberley Scarborough

National Teaching Fellow 2006 Kim Scarborough is Senior Lecturer-Academic in Practice in the Department of Nursing at the University of the West of England. She entered academia in 2001 as a continuation of a 21-year nursing career working mainly with people with learning disabilities who had high healthcare needs. Underpinning Kim's practice is the philosophy that people who use health and social care services and their family carers are equal partners in any professional relationship of caring and education. On entering academia she challenged what she viewed as traditional education that failed to involve service users in more than tokenistic ways. Through her links with family carer groups and advocacy organisations Kim knew that service-users wanted to participate in the education of health professionals. Kim works to engage service users and families at multiple levels within the university. As well as being active learners. users and carers are supported to be involved in developing, reviewing, validating and managing programmes, teaching and assessing students and developing learning resources which may be used by academics. She uses workbased learning to support the development of individuals in gaining the skills they want to be as fully involved as the individual wants to be.  As one student commented of this success: "We're being taken seriously; we're being listened to". Kim's areas of interest are in learning disability nursing specifically but also the wider nursing, allied health professional and social work curriculum. The development of practical activities to ensure meetings meet the needs of everyone and focus on outcomes through participation is key to this being successful. Kim is currently developing user involvement in research about the impact on student learning of users in education. Kim is also involved with learning in practice, practice development and has commenced a project working with users and carers to develop clinical skills through simulation.