Our specialist courses

Welcome to the Assistant Practitioner /Assistant course. We hope you enjoy your studies with us and gain a lot of benefit in the process, both from the work and from meeting your fellow colleagues in the profession, sharing knowledge and forming a good support network.

Our aims are to help you gain the level of knowledge and skills required to become an assistant healthcare practitioner, who provides a high level of quality care to meet our clients’ needs and our professional standards.

About this course
The ‘ATO’ course has been running for many years under the guidance of the North West School of Audiology (NWSA), and had been developed by Angela Mack, who was Head of Service at the Royal Bolton Hospital. When Angela moved to Australia the course was taken over by the North West School of Audiology (NWSA). We must thank Angela for all the hard work she put into the original course. We have updated this course a number of times to meet current knowledge and skills and increased the teaching time by adding in some new topics and practical sessions We now have BSA accreditation for two parts of the course (for which you receive a BSA certificate on completion and passing the written and practical exams).
The course this year is delivered over 4 taught modules with a fifth short module for revision and final assessment.

There is a total of 74 taught hours throughout the course with an expectation of up to a further 262 hours of supervised and self learning taking place at your own place of work over the period of the course, (depending upon level of experience). You will receive a practice book during the course to fill in at your workplace for supervised sessions and sign off for competencies in the practical elements you will be required to achieve.

There will be a 2-hour written theoretical assessment and a 3-hour practical assessment at the end of the course. The practical assessment can be taken the following year after completion of the workbook, or the same day as the theoretical exam.

Credit
The course is accredited by the British Society of Audiology (BSA) for ‘Audiometry and Tympanometry’ and ‘Otoscopy and impression taking’, both of which you will receive a BSA certificate following successful passing of the practical exam, and this will be tied into the practical workbook.

It is approved by the British Academy of Audiology (BAA). It has also had previous approval as prior learning for the Foundation Degree in Healthcare Science at MMU prior to that course being withdrawn in Manchester.
We are currently working to national accreditation from education bodies due to the new Apprenticeship Scheme for Assistants in Healthcare Science in the NHS.

You will be presented with a Certificate of Achievement for the theory course on completion of the course and passing the final assessments  

There will be ongoing assessments throughout the course to ensure you are meeting your learning and understanding of each module.

This course will give you the level of understanding required so that you can progress through your career and if the opportunity arises, go on to study at Foundation Degree level, which many previous course attendees have done.

Within the course content we have included information on the KSF levels required by Assistant Practitioners in the NHS.

We also welcome your feedback on aspects of the course and any improvements we can make.