5.0 Focus groups

Read about how focus groups were used to gather information for the review.

Focus groups were conducted to gather input, discuss, and make recommendations from the voices of students, members of staff at a higher education institution, members of staff at a professional or regulatory body and practice education facilitators. Overall, there were 52 attendees from different disciplines, with 26 attending on Thursday 2 February 2023 and 25 attending the Wednesday 8 February 2023 session.

There were 3 different breakout rooms on both days focusing on a particular question that included a facilitator to lead the discussion and a notetaker to record this. The layout of the breakout rooms across both days displayed the below.

Table 1: This table illustrates the respective breakout room across the 2 focus group days focused on and displays the number of participants within each room in addition to their roles.

Group	2 February 2023	8 February 2023
Group Theme	2 February 2023 Participants	8 February 2023 Participants
Group The digital technologies currently in use in the provision of pre-registration and undergraduate health and care education.	2 February 2023 4 members of Higher Education Institutions 1 practice education facilitator 1 student 1 regulatory body	8 February 2023 4 members of Higher Education Institutions 1 student 2 regulatory bodies 1 other
Group The digital literacies and digital technologies education currently being provided within pre-registration and undergraduate curricula and teaching.	2 February 2023 4 members of Higher Education Institutions 2 practice education facilitators 1 student 1 regulatory body 1 other	8 February 2023 4 members of Higher Education Institutions 1 practice education facilitator 2 students 2 regulatory bodies
Group The specialist and technical skills needed by faculty staff (clinical and academic).	2 February 2023 5 members of Higher Education Institutions 1 practice education facilitator 1 student 1 regulatory body 1 other	8 February 2023 4 members of Higher Education Institutions 1 practice education facilitator 1 student 1 regulatory body 1 other

Within these separate breakout rooms, a Mural board was used for all participants to collate their ideas under their respective themes. This helped promote discussion amongst the group, in addition to the use of probing questions and recommendations to continue the conversation (see Appendix C for focus group questions).

After the breakout discussions, all participants returned to the main Microsoft (MS) Teams meeting to share their conclusions. Any additional comments from the discussions and notes collated from the nominated notetaker from each group were then added to the mural board in preparation for thematic analysis.