SPARC

A: SPARC (Students and Placements in ARC) is a piece of placement management software used by the School of Medicine to manage allocations and communicate placements to Placement Providers and Students.  

A: SPARC has been in use by our colleagues in the School of Healthcare for a number of years and the School of Medicine are working to share the advantages of the system with School of Medicine Placement Providers and students. We believe SPARC will allow us to efficiently and consistently communicate placement information with those that need it. By delivering all the key information you require in one usable format, we hope this will assist you with the complex placement arrangements you make on behalf of our students.  

If you have any feedback from your experience please let our Medicine Placements team know.

A: Once set up as a user on the SPARC system Placement Providers can log-in with the email address you usually use to communicate with us to view student allocations for your placement area. 

A: Please contact the Medicine Placements team with information on the access you require. We need to know:

• Which of our Placement Providers you are connected with;
• Which specialty you require placement information for;
• Which cohort of students you require information for.

A: Placement Providers can log-in here to access SPARC.

Please note a different website is used by students to log into their placement allocations therefore if you get any student queries about SPARC please direct them to the Medicine Placements team.

A: Please do not hesitate to contact the Medicine Placements team we are able to answer questions via email, telephone or set up a video call to share screens to assist with your query.  

A: To ensure information is only shared with colleagues involved in the organisation of placements for School of Medicine students please let us know if your requirements for access to student information change by contacting the Medicine Placements Team.  

A: An 'Activity' is a session that we have timetabled a student for during their usual placement time. This may be a session such as RRAPIDs, Mental Health sessions, Radiology teaching and we need to make you aware of the timetabling of the activity so the student can be released from placement to attend.  

A: Once you have logged into SPARC you should navigate to the 'Reports' menu where you can access a Student Allocations report. For full instructions of downloading this information please see the Getting Started with SPARC – Information for Providers Guide. Details of how to download the report can be found on pages 7 to 9. 

A: To simplify the information provided within SPARC we have indicated with the students' allocations which Rotation (time period) the allocation relates to e.g. Rotation 1, Rotation 2. 

If you would like some additional assistance in understanding your student allocations please do not hesitate to contact the Medicine Placements team we are able to answer questions via email, telephone or set up a video call to share screens to assist with your query.

A: Please get in touch with the Medicine Placements Team, we have been undertaking a lot of development work on the system but we are always keen to hear from users on additional aspects that can make the system more user friendly.  

A: A student ID number is considered by the University as a piece of personal information and so we are unable to publish this on the SPARC system. A solution is for Placement Providers to use the students' username which is the first part of the student email address prior to the '@leeds.ac.uk'. The username is unique to every student and therefore can be used as an alternative to the student ID number

We are working to have this field available on the Placement Allocations Report for ease of use and will update you on this development in due course. 

A: Student photos are not currently available within SPARC but we are working on bringing these into the system. 

Until this functionality is developed the SES Placements team will provide Placement Providers with student photos where necessary. 

Please be aware that photos of students are personal information and therefore we ask that photos are not displayed in public without the permission of the student.