Within this unit, you will review the issues of substance abuse in Australia, considering at-risk patient groups, relevant sociocultural determinants of health, and the role of primary health services in treatment and rehabilitation. You will evaluate patient presentations, applying pathophysiological knowledge and critical thinking to differentiate between and diagnose complex multi-system presentations. This unit will assist you in building your clinical judgement and decision-making skills to develop and rationalise management plans for toxicological and toxinological cases, including chemical, biological, and radiological incidents, and environmental emergencies. In doing so, you will appraise and synthesise peer-reviewed literature reporting evidence-based management of toxicological, toxinological, environmental, chemical, biological and radiological cases and formulate recommendations for practice.

Each 6-credit Undergraduate unit at CQUniversity requires an overall time commitment of an average of 12.5 hours of study per week, making a total of 150 hours for the unit.

Every unit is reviewed for enhancement each year. At the most recent review, the following staff and student feedback items were identified and recommendations were made.

Feedback from CQU Success; SUTE data.

Comments state that the volume of content is too high when students also have a five-week placement unit in the same term.

It is recommended that content is reviewed prior to next offering and that lectures are also streamlined and shortened when updated. The content volume this year was no different to last year, and remains within established time commitment expectations, yet this cohort made several comments that all invoked the fact that they had placement this term as a reason to reduce content volume in other units. It is therefore also recommended that study expectations are reiterated to students at the start of term so that they understand that workloads for one unit cannot be reduced simply because they have work-integrated learning in another unit that term.

Feedback from Verbal feedback; emails; SUTE data.

The residential school received excellent feedback, with students commonly stating that the scenario practice enabled them to translate theory into practice. Students stated that the practical scenarios helped them to better understand the theory, to the extent that they would have performed better on the quiz had they taken than after, rather than before, the residential school.

It is difficult to derive a recommendation from this feedback as the 2025 offering shall have its residential school removed, with the practical assessment replaced with another theoretical task. The strongly positive feedback is of course gratifying though, and whilst many students lamented the removal of the residential school there was also feedback expressing that the financial savings for future students would be welcomed. In lieu of a practical component the weekly tutorials will continue to discuss real-world management of cases, and I recommend that these are expanded to include a larger number of example cases beyond the one or two currently covered in tutorials. I am also designing a teaching component involving conversations with paramedics around real cases that they have attended that are relevant to and/or best representative of that week's topic. Whilst students will lack practical application of this unit in the lab, they can still learn skills and ponder considerations of practical case management from other experienced paramedics through applying social learning methodology.

Feedback from Verbal feedback; emails; SUTE data.

Many very positive comments were received around the quality of the lecture and tutorial content, and for the provision of the additional formative quizzes and formative feedback on the written task. Whilst many students noted correctly that this final PME unit is the most complicated of the group, they felt well-prepared for the quiz and practical assessment.

Content is due for redevelopment, so it is recommended that I continue to use the green screen when producing the new content and also that I explore the inclusion of polling technology available in Echo360 to create an interactive component that is value-added and engaging. This will bring a immediate knowledge check into the lecture instead of leaving it seperately in weekly learning objectives and the practice quizzes. I will continue to provide audio-only versions of all content, and will again provide the two large formative quizzes to help students revise and prepare for that assessment task.

Feedback from Self-reflection.

There remains an unacceptable level of poor paraphrasing and outright plagiarism in the written report assessment task that is far below the standard expected of third-year students.

The best recommendation is to directly include ALC and other resources on writing skills into this unit, and to produce a video for students talking through this issue and presenting examples of de-identified student submissions. I will discuss the issue with ALC staff and will consider embedding this content into the unit as mandatory tasks.

Feedback from SUTE data.

Students' perception of having learnt from their assessment tasks decreased this year from the 2023 unit evaluation. There was a decline also in student evaluation of the clarity of unit requirements.

For the 2025 offering it is recommended that short videos are produced that directly explain why each assessment task has been developed to further their learning and test their performance, and how students will learn from their assessments along the way. I do already provide videos explaining how to best complete these tasks and achieve a great mark, but these have not best explained the full value of these tasks for their learning and development. As aforementioned all tasks this year did again have videos explaining their relevant task requirements, but these should be reviewed to determine if I could better convey alginment to Learning Outcomes and to better explicate requirements.