Supporting Healthcare – Supporting the Adult Nursing Team Level 3

This programme is designed for learners interested in developing the knowledge, clinical skills and professional behaviours required for a future career in healthcare, particularly adult nursing and healthcare support.

The Technical Qualification contains a Core Component and an Occupational Specialism and prepares you for skilled employment, apprenticeships or higher-level study, including university.

Year 1: Core Knowledge and Skills

During Year 1, you’ll develop the broad healthcare knowledge that underpins your progression into the Adult Nursing occupational specialism. The Core Component covers nine content areas alongside six core professional skills.

The healthcare sector

Explore how healthcare in the UK has developed and how modern healthcare services are organised and delivered. This includes the history and development of the NHS, the role of NHS Trusts and Foundation Trusts and the contribution of private, charitable and other healthcare organisations.

The course covers primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare, how different services are funded and the organisations responsible for regulating healthcare. You’ll also explore career and progression routes, barriers that can affect access to services and external pressures such as pandemics and infrastructure disruption.

You’ll look at how electronic health records, remote monitoring, wearable technology, artificial intelligence and assistive technology are changing healthcare delivery.

Health, safety and environmental regulations in the healthcare sector

Learn how healthcare organisations keep patients, staff and visitors safe, including health and safety legislation and regulations, identifying and managing hazards and risks, and the responsibilities of healthcare workers and employers.

You’ll examine the consequences of unsafe practice and non-compliance, including harm to individuals, disciplinary or legal action and regulatory consequences. The course also covers organisations responsible for maintaining and regulating healthcare standards and how safe working practices support consistently high-quality care.

Managing information and data in the healthcare sector

Explore why accurate information is essential to safe and effective healthcare and how patient information is collected, recorded, stored, accessed and shared to support assessment, diagnosis, treatment and continuity of care.

You’ll study confidentiality, information governance, the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), including how healthcare organisations protect sensitive information through secure systems, passwords, authorised access, staff training and cybersecurity measures.

You’ll also look at how healthcare professionals collect medical histories and use information from individuals, relatives, carers and healthcare records to support clinical decision-making and person-centred care.

Good scientific and clinical practice

Develop an understanding of the standards expected when working in scientific and clinical environments. This includes following Standard Operating Procedures, maintaining and calibrating equipment, managing stock and storing healthcare products appropriately.

You’ll examine why standardised procedures are important for patient safety, quality assurance, regulatory compliance, infection prevention, risk management and effective teamwork, as well as how poor scientific or clinical practice could affect patient outcomes.

Providing person-centred care

Explore NHS values including compassion, respect and dignity, improving lives, commitment to quality of care, working together for patients and ensuring everyone counts.

You’ll learn how healthcare professionals identify an individual's needs, wishes, preferences and goals and involve individuals and their families in decisions about care. This includes communication, care planning, consent, dignity, choice, independence, risk management and shared decision-making, as well as adapting care to ensure it is safe, inclusive and personalised.

Health and wellbeing

Explore the shift within healthcare from simply treating illness towards prevention, health promotion and supporting wellbeing, including how healthcare, social care, communities and individuals work together to improve health outcomes.

You’ll study health education and health promotion, the work of organisations such as the World Health Organization, UK Health Security Agency and Department of Health and Social Care, and approaches to preventing ill health.

The course also looks at supporting physical, emotional, intellectual and social wellbeing and how appropriate signposting can help people access support for nutrition, hydration, mobility, continence, personal care and other activities of daily living.

Safeguarding

Develop the knowledge required to recognise and respond to safeguarding concerns and understand how healthcare professionals protect an individual's health, wellbeing, rights and safety.

You’ll explore safeguarding principles including empowerment, prevention, proportionality and appropriate protection. This includes abuse, neglect and vulnerability, professional responsibilities, safeguarding policies, reporting and escalation procedures and the roles of agencies that work together to protect adults, children and young people.

Core science concepts

Develop the scientific knowledge needed to understand human health and disease, including cells and cell theory, cell structures and functions, movement of substances across cell membranes, DNA and RNA and fundamental genetic concepts.

You’ll also investigate microorganisms and pathogens, transmission of infectious disease, responses to infection, injury and tissue repair, diagnostic techniques including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), homeostasis, physiological measurements and the classification of diseases and disorders.

Further science concepts in health

Build on your core science knowledge with a more detailed understanding of human anatomy and physiology and how body systems work together.

You’ll explore the musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems and other major physiological systems, together with how disease or dysfunction can affect normal functioning. This includes cardiovascular function, respiratory health and conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), renal health and chronic kidney disease, endocrine function and hormones, homeostasis and the integumentary system.

You’ll also use physiological and clinical data to understand how conditions are identified, monitored and managed, providing an important scientific foundation for working safely within adult nursing environments.

Core skills

Alongside the nine content areas, you’ll develop six core skills which are applied and assessed through the Employer Set Project:

• Person-centred care: identifying individual needs, goals and preferences; assessing risks; developing person-centred recommendations and care plans; encouraging self-management; and considering consent, confidentiality, safeguarding and individual choice
• Communication: adapting communication to individual needs, using active listening and open questioning and communicating compassionately and professionally through written, verbal and digital communication while maintaining confidentiality, professional boundaries and dignity.
• Team working: understanding multidisciplinary teams and the roles and responsibilities of healthcare professionals, contributing to collaborative care, communicating concerns, escalating appropriately and working towards common goals.
• Reflective evaluation: reflecting on your performance, identifying strengths and areas for improvement, using feedback and evaluating communication, teamwork and care strategies, including how your actions influence patient safety, engagement and outcomes.
• Researching: locating appropriate sources, selecting and synthesising evidence, using research to justify healthcare recommendations and developing referencing and digital research skills.
• Presenting: developing professional presentation skills, producing clear digital presentations, using healthcare terminology, communicating with an appropriate audience, summarising recommendations and responding professionally to questions.

Industry placement and Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust

A major part of the T Level is applying your learning in a real healthcare environment. You’ll complete a minimum of 315 hours of industry placement with an employer, providing meaningful workplace experience.

At Oldham College, our placement delivery partner for this pathway is Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust. You’ll complete your placement within hospital settings across the Trust, giving you the opportunity to experience professional healthcare practice and work alongside NHS staff.

The partnership goes beyond work placement. You’ll also receive bespoke training sessions delivered by Northern Care Alliance professionals, helping you connect classroom learning with current NHS practice and develop the professional knowledge, behaviours and clinical awareness expected within the healthcare workforce.

Year 2: Occupational Specialism

Supporting the Adult Nursing Team

In Year 2, the programme becomes increasingly occupational and practical. You’ll undertake the Supporting Healthcare Occupational Specialism Core alongside the Supporting the Adult Nursing Team pathway, developing the knowledge and practical skills required to reach threshold competence within healthcare support.

Supporting Healthcare: common occupational skills

Before specialising in adult nursing, you’ll develop common healthcare support skills across three key areas:

• Maintaining safe working practices and a safe environment, including assessing risk, following infection prevention and control procedures and contributing to an appropriate clinical environment
• Supporting an individual's overall care, comfort and wellbeing while maintaining dignity, privacy and independence.
• Assisting registered healthcare professionals with routine tasks, including physiological observations, accurate recording, recognising changes in an individual's condition and knowing when concerns need to be reported or escalated.

Adult Nursing Performance Outcome 1: Assist the Adult Nursing Team with Clinical Tasks

Learn how to support registered healthcare professionals with clinical observations and patient risk assessments.

This includes using and understanding healthcare assessment tools relating to:

• Nutrition and malnutrition
• Body mass index (BMI)
• Fluid balance
• Pain
• Continence
• Oral health
• Mobility and falls
• Wounds
• Skin integrity and pressure damage

You’ll gather information from patients and members of the multidisciplinary team, identify potential risks, accurately record findings, report information to the appropriate registered professional and recognise when concerns need to be escalated.

This will develop your ability to contribute appropriately to clinical assessment while understanding the boundaries of the healthcare support worker role.

Adult Nursing Performance Outcome 2: Support Individuals to Meet Activities of Daily Living and to Live as Well as Possible

Develop skills in supporting patients with their everyday needs while maintaining dignity, independence and choice. This includes nutrition and hydration, continence, personal hygiene, oral health, dressing and undressing, mobility, rest and sleep, and expressing individual identity and preferences.

You’ll learn to assess how much support an individual requires, encourage independence wherever possible and recognise when assistance is necessary. You’ll also maintain accurate food, fluid and care records and learn to report concerns appropriately using structured communication such as Situation, Background, Assessment and Recommendation (SBAR).

The course also explores how healthcare workers can support individuals to remain socially, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually active and adapt care for people with specific needs. This includes cognitive impairment and dementia, care for individuals approaching the end of life and support for carers and families.

Adult Nursing Performance Outcome 3: Assist the Adult Nursing Team with Skin Integrity Assessments and the Care and Treatment of Skin Conditions

Develop specialist knowledge and practical skills relating to skin health and wound prevention.

You’ll learn how to contribute to skin integrity assessments using recognised tools including the Waterlow Score, Braden Scale and European Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel (EPUAP) classification system, as well as completing body maps and accurately recording and communicating findings.

You’ll explore common skin conditions and injuries including dermatitis, cellulitis, psoriasis, eczema, burns, cuts, abrasions and pressure injuries.

The course also covers preventative approaches such as repositioning, pressure-relieving equipment, nutrition and hydration, continence management and maintaining good skin care.

You’ll develop an understanding of simple wound care and dressing techniques and how to provide individuals and carers with appropriate information about maintaining skin health and preventing deterioration.

The qualification contains two equally weighted parts:

• Core Component: 50% of the overall Technical Qualification
• Occupational Specialism: 50% of the overall Technical Qualification

Within the Core Component, Paper 1 contributes 36%, Paper 2 contributes 24% and the Employer Set Project contributes 40%.

Core Examination Paper 1

A two hour 30 minute written examination worth 90 marks. It assesses Content Areas 1 to 7 through short, medium and extended open-response questions. The examination is set and marked by Pearson.

Core Examination Paper 2

A two hour written examination worth 70 marks, covering Content Areas 8 and 9: Core Science Concepts and Further Science Concepts in Health. Questions include medium and extended open responses, and the examination is set and marked by Pearson.

Employer Set Project

An externally assessed project lasting 9 hours 45 minutes and worth 126 marks. You will respond to a vocational healthcare case study through four tasks:

• Research and report
• Role play and reflection
• Updating a healthcare plan
• A handover presentation with questions

This assessment covers Core Skills CS1 to CS6.

Supporting Healthcare Occupational Specialism Core

A synoptic project lasting 3 hours 50 minutes and worth 138 marks. Assessment includes assessing an individual's health and wellbeing, a Professional Discussion supported by a Portfolio of Evidence, and recognising changes in an individual's condition.

Evidence can include a videoed role play, professional discussion and written evidence. It is assessed by the provider and moderated by Pearson.

Supporting the Adult Nursing Team pathway

A synoptic project lasting 4 hours 40 minutes and worth 108 marks. It consists of:

• Supporting Individuals with Skin Integrity and Skin Conditions
• Supporting a Patient with Activities of Daily Living
• A Practical Patient Assessment and Support task

Evidence includes written work and a videoed role play, and the assessment is externally assessed by Pearson.

Taken together, the Supporting Healthcare and Supporting Adult Nursing Team Occupational Specialism assessments total 8 hours 30 minutes and 246 marks.

Within the Adult Nursing pathway assessment, 25% of the marks relate to assisting with clinical tasks, 47% to supporting activities of daily living and 28% to skin integrity and skin conditions.

The Core Component and Employer Set Project are graded A to E. The Occupational Specialism is graded Pass, Merit or Distinction, and the overall T Level Technical Qualification is graded Pass, Merit, Distinction or Distinction*.

This T Level can prepare you for highly skilled employment, an apprenticeship or higher-level education within healthcare. You will develop core knowledge and healthcare support skills that can help you work towards full occupational competence.

The qualification aligns with the Level 3 Senior Healthcare Support Worker Apprenticeship and can support progression into healthcare support roles, particularly those supporting registered nurses and multidisciplinary teams within hospital and community healthcare environments.

Possible progression routes include:

• Senior Healthcare Support Worker
• Further Level 3 healthcare apprenticeships
• Level 5 Nursing Associate
• Level 5 Assistant Practitioner (Health)
• Higher National Certificate (HNC) or Higher National Diploma (HND) programmes

If you want to progress towards professional nursing, you could also consider a university degree or degree apprenticeship leading towards professional healthcare occupations such as Registered Nurse.

Higher technical routes can lead to roles such as Nursing Associate and Assistant Practitioner, with opportunities to progress to Level 6 study.

The course provides a strong foundation for careers in adult nursing, nursing associate practice, healthcare support, assistant practitioner roles and the wider healthcare sector. Your NHS hospital placement will also provide valuable experience to support future applications.

If you are considering university, you should always check the specific entry requirements for individual universities and degree programmes, as these can differ between providers.