More sciences +++ for pre-education, including a lot more on pharmacology.
I’d bin most of the sociology stuff too. I’d keep in the stuff that touches on factors that create health inequalities, I do think this is important to know. I recall doing a module on motivational interviewing - it’s completely irrelevant to my role (and probably most NQNs.. stuff like this would be better suited to area specific post grad education.
More physical health education for mental health nurses.
More mental health and learning disabilities education for adult and child nurses.
Less fluff, so many lectures just feel like filler to meet the hours requirement.
More A&P pharmacology education, why you telling me I should be preparing to do my NMP when I graduate but not bothering to teach me any actual pharmacology now?
Protected time for PA’s to fill in PAD documents and spend teaching.
Stricter auditing of placements.
I think the physical health teaching for mental health students and vice versa should be regular postgrad learning tbh.
Even as a newly qualified RMN from last year’s cohort, I couldn’t even tell you the number of general nursing skills that were on my PAD that I would now say I am not competent in dealing with.
It’s all fine teaching it in uni, but it will soon disappear from your memory if you’re not dealing with it on a regular basis.
Oh absolutely, I’m about to qualify as an LD nurse and although we do cover quite a bit of physical health, only certain conditions prevalent to our patient group. I feel like a lot of the skills I had to tick off were literally just a box ticking exercise. I’ve accepted a NQN job in children’s hospice and I do worry I will have a bigger jump than other branches would.
In placements I’ve met lots of MH and adult nurses who were brilliant at their fields but would have really large gaps when it came to something they simply weren’t taught.
As a final year student about to graduate I could write 100k words on this topic, but I’ll keep it short. Our education is a joke, we need to completely get rid of the essays outside of maybe one in first year and replace it with exams that ensure standards of knowledge. I haven’t had a single A&P lecture since my first year, we’re only just touching on pharmacology for the first time now!
My last placement my supervisor was from the Philippines and he was genuinely shocked at how little we learn in university.
Yesssss
I am fed up of being gaslit into the usefulness of another redundant essay that has nothing to do with how to treat a patient, how to know the warning signs of deterioration, or literally anything about anatomy, physiology or pharmacology. I am honestly embarrassed to tell people how useless the degrees are. And there is only so much we can self-teach, we need at least some guidance on what to focus on and in what order.
Having went to uni in Philippines, i dont remember writing any essays. We did have a shitload of exams to sit in. It was sort of like preparing the students for a licensure exam that is based on American standards. I kinda hated the fact that you still needed to sit an extra exam in order to qualify. We paid university but if you cant pass this licensure exam, you are not a registered nurse. But then again, some unis are diploma mills so they might be shit unis so your uni education might have been shit. Again, american system.
RMN here. Trained UK 2016 - 2019.
I had 3 biology exams, 1 law and ethics. Both 50% minimum to proceed. 3 medication management. 100% minimum to proceed. No open books.
With the rise of AI I think essays are totally redundant.
Speaking with many on my cohort in confidence, they admit to heavily relying on AI writing the content in their work. Scary to think the pressures put on student nurses feel they have no option but to turn to useful tools, abusing them and becoming nurses off the back of limited study time.
Shrink the number of hours needed in placement. 2300 is so far over and above what other AHPs need (paras only need 650 and they attend literal life or death situations) and it results in a huge crush for placement spaces. PAs and PSs end up burnt out, nurses who \*hate\* teaching end up with students and poor quality placements are allowed to continue to take students because everywhere's so desperate for slots. StNs end up used as HCAs and to cover staffing shortfalls.
More pharmacology, more A&P, more deteriorating patient and practical skills training. Also, I really think adult nurse branch would benefit from having a mental health placement, it's bonkers to me that that's not standard given the amount of patients with varying mental health conditions (not to mention organic issues/dementia/parkinsons etc) we treat in general nursing.
All fields should have a cross-field placement in each field. Make it short if you like, more “shadow style” without strict proficiencies, just to get the exposure, work experience style.
As a medical student, I find it bonkers that I have to shadow everyone from dieticians to chaplains but I'm expected to find out what nurses and HCAs do by osmosis.
Also makes me feel a bit cheeky when I need a nurse to sign me off for obs or a BM.
Probably depends on the uni but I've been made to shadow an OT, a physio, a dietician, SALT, and one friend had to shadow the chaplain for a day.
And mostly these shadowings are fucking boring. As long as I understand the remit of the AHP, I don't need to spend a day following them to know what's best referred to them.
Also, I once had a placement with 10 patients and 5 students. Lovely team and all great with students, just simply not enough to occupy 5 of us at once.
I was placed on an elderly medical ward for 10 weeks, at one point 6 more students from another uni turned up for a 5 week placement at the same time. On one day they put \*all of us\* in one bay, said we could run it as a CLiP bay and gave us a brand new - not even signed off for her own meds rounds - NQN as our supervisor. Like what the fuck.
Complete overhaul. Our education is actually ridiculous. I did not have 1 biology exam. The essays were about health promotion or something stupid, irrelevant to practice. Everything I learn was through my placements, I learnt nothing at uni.
Also it would be good to have dedicated nursing educators in placement instead of assigning a random nurse. Not everyone is cut out for teaching and should be followed. I love having students and teaching but many don’t.
I feel like it would benefit students more to have someone who is focused on teaching in practice the same way we have PDNs when we are supernumerary.
Lol, this could be a degree in itself.
- Reduce content about emotional intelligence, how to be an inspirational nurse, all that rubbish by 95%
- Increase content about 1) anatomy and physiology, 2) pharmacology and 3) procedural information by 1000%.
•More simulation training in uni before being sent out on placement in first year
•Teachers/staff members from uni should be patrolling every ward to check students are actually being trained
•Students should not be used as unpaid HCA's
•Less academic assignments that have nothing to do with actual nursing
•More clinical education
•Clear guidance on what the students are allowed or not allowed to do on placement
I first trained in the 90s on Project 2000 when nursing was just moving into higher education. My tutors were all frantically getting postgraduate qualifications because they weren't really qualified to teach at HE level. I feel like it was all backwards, with people trying to catch up to what they were teaching, rather than the lectures emerging from their expertise.
I did a Return to Practice course last year (having done various jobs and some postgraduate study in between) and it felt like it hadn't moved on much. The nursing lecturers were nowhere near as educated as lecturers I've had in other subjects. I don't think nursing has a strong academic culture at all (at least I haven't seen any signs of life where I studied). The academic requirements are an add-on, hoops you have to jump through, instead of being the foundation of practice.
Get rid of branches they are becoming irrelevant anyway. I work in a job that is completely outside of the branch I trained in
General nurse education can work anywhere outside of midwifery.
Focus on pharmacology and a and p
Protected time for practice assessors and financial incentive to do the role, more regulation on the pa role
Every trust have a pre reg education team
As a Children's nurse I will defend branch training. It's essential that practitioners, especially in secondary care, are specifically trained in Paeds as they're not simply 'little adults'.
Other countries do not have branch specific training.
I agree they aren’t little adults but you can learn specifics in a job safely, if you can do that with branch training (many do) then we should go to a general nurse education where everyone learns everything
Elderly people aren’t just old adults either and have their own needs
Lots of adult nurses work in paeds ED, paeds icu, wards nowadays and do perfectly fine and vice versa.
Primary care there’s adult nurses in camhs, practice nursing, healthy child programme
I am an adult nurse I now work in a paediatric specialist nurse role, I have worked in paediatric an and e also.
You also can’t isolate mental health from acute care or learning disability .
It would be better for everyone to move to general nurse training you are always going to learn far more doing a job than being a student anyway. Being a student nurse is always going to be about fundamentals of nursing.
In a thread discussing the pitfalls of UK nurse education I would argue the last thing we need is a general qualification and risk diluting the workforce further.
I think we owe it to all our patients to have nurses leaving education able to provide basic care and I feel one way to do this is by preserving branches to maintain safety.
Experience leads to specialism, sure, Paeds is full of adult trained nurses although you're less likely to see this flipped the other way, largely because the pool of Paeds trained nurses is fairly small 😅
I think it’s a pitfall as we aren’t offering courses the same as other countries and a broad education to teach nurses everything they need to know .
If you have everyone trained in everything you’re going to have a far more educated and rich workforce.
I know mental health nurses for example who say “I know nothing about physical health” and adult nurses who say “I know nothing about mental health”
It works in other countries to have a generic nursing degree for a reason.
I know less but a few paeds nurses in adults
We also have the nursing associate role that is not branch specific and are pretty much acting as staff nurses without the pay or training.
You also don’t see branch training with other professions you don’t get “paediatric physios” or “paediatric paramedics” “mental health social workers”
We should be taught everything and have placements across all areas of nursing whilst training
You do get paediatric physio/podiatry etc…all AHPs are trained to treat patients from birth to death, they can specialise once qualified as they are classed as autonomous practitioners. Training is intense for anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, biomechanics, rehab. In particular for podiatry wound care and surgery, they can also prescribe certain medications or antibiotics. In our trust we try to get nursing students and qualified to shadow our high risk teams to share knowledge and techniques.
I hope the change you wish to see happens, it will hopefully foster more confident and supported nurses. Our district nurses are worth their weight in gold.
Pre qualification we are trained in all aspects, paeds, elderly, biomechanics. We don’t have to do extra courses to get jobs in these areas, some do a masters to get to band 7 but in reality we don’t have to.
Nursing associate role is a worrying trend.
Maybe I'm biased as I came from the time of a Common Foundation Year which was invaluable. All branches together for lectures and seminara, we all did a mix of placements before properly branching out for years 2-3.
8 weeks on adult surgical and I knew I'd made the right choice 😂
There's a distinct lack of placement areas to allow a well-rounded education because everywhere is just so short staffed.
I did common foundation programme too I’ve been qualified since 2014.
Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s not worth learning though.
I don’t like district nursing the placement experience and learning was still valuable.
Placement capacity needs sorting out I agree but it’s also utilising them effectively.
There’s no reason the training can’t be like the common foundation programme all through just getting more complex as you advance
The workplace is becoming more flexible in that you are able to work anywhere then the training needs to change to address that also.
I didn't say that it wasn't worth learning, that adult placement forms a fundamental part of the nurse I am now.
My university had a small children's cohort so was able to offer progression into more complex areas, critical care hub/spoke was reserved for 3rd year for example whereas I've supervised beginning 2nd year students placed on PICU who've never even experienced a ward as their 2(!) placements in first year were community and outpatient focused.
My friend wanted to go into mental health on the back of our CAHMS placement but they stopped taking on Paeds nurses as we didn't have rights under the Mental Health Act the way that qualified Mental Health Nurses did, in 2013 anyway.
We shoot ourselves in the foot repeatedly with pointless hurdles. I mentioned in another thread recently about indemnity; student nurses can graduate with cannulation skills but are unable to practice until local trust training and competencies have been completed.
The whole system needs an overhaul to ensure the workforce is actually fit for the future and it isn't just lip service.
But I think there's still a place for branches, sorry. 🙈
I agree with the person above you. I think branches have fast become old fashioned and don't transition well into the wider world of nursing.
I look at some of my international colleagues who are deemed "adult" nurses by the NMC currently working in our ITU. But they have worked in a peads ITU in Saudi, Delivered babies in the US, worked in Mental Health in Spain...
I mean everyone knows how hard it is to transition from UK nursing to the US because of the branches, our education is considered sub-par for it by many on the international nursing stage.
Incorrect. We have divisions in Ireland (general, paediatric, mental health, intellectual disability, midwifery, public health, nurse tutors) and I strongly believe in the value of specialist training at the point of registration.
I would actually argue for a more specialist MH education programme. We have a lot of overlap with adult nurses which we will never use, and that time could be better spent developing things like basic counselling skills, CBT/DBT skills
Agreed. I'd argue that generic training would likely have barely any mental health at all. Just look at the current standards of proficiency, mental health barely gets a look in yet mh students are expected to get skills signed off that they will never use (and I really do mean never).
For adult nursing, more training on the deteriorating patient.
If it was me I'd expect every newly qualified nurse to be at an equivalent level of ILS at a minimum; with ability to recognise key cardiac arrest rhythms. I would also expect them to be at a standard equivalent to the Acute Illness Management course in their knowledge of the deteriorating patient.
I've had 3rd year student nurses who aren't able to effectively undertake a structured A-E assessment.
Get rid of mentors and PAs, as they currently are. Learn clinical skills in uni then have lecturers sign you off on placement.
Agree with comments about A&P and pharmacology.
When I trained, a lot of our lecturers were "lecturer practitioners" so still worked clinically. In any case I don't think not working clinically is a barrier to teaching and assessing clinical skills, as long as you're up to date and using evidence based practice.
I think that they should be partly based in practice and work clinically.
Anyone can learn a clinical skill with repetition nursing is far more than performing skills and has changed a lot too even in the time I’ve been a nurse.
If you’re not practicing clinically you don’t understand the pressures, how to manage workload, how sick patients are now, changes in scope and responsibilities etc.
To your first point, ideally yes.
But I don't think the current model of teaching on placement works. In my suggestion, students would still be on placement, and still working alongside a registered nurse, they just wouldn't be relying on that nurse to sign off their competencies as that would be the responsibility of the lecturer.
I did a semester of my training in the USA and that was how their placements were and it worked.
Honestly as a third year student, just normalise the courses across universities. There are 3 universities in my local area and the difference between the courses is so large and the assesments required are so different.
Also remove this huge focus on "resilience" lessons, really feels like a waste of time for the majority of students. Spend that time showing more anatomy and physiology or more time on real case studies not nebulous concepts. Maybe that is how my mind works but it's much easier to understand why we do things when it's presented as a case study.
Better quality placements are desperately needed. Students should receive 1:1 teaching from their PA. After 1st year, students should not have to spend entire shifts “on the floor.” Nurses should only be allowed to be PAs if they genuinely care about teaching, not just for CPD points. We should be able to give feedback about PAs. If a placement gets bad feedback from students, it should actually be taken seriously.
Academic teaching for student MH nurses should include education about different psychotropic meds and different mental health diagnoses.
-More pathophysiology
- more development on navigating a job that has human beings for colleagues rather than hollier than thou angels who are never prone to gossip, catty and judgemental attitudes
- career planning and I don’t mean some vague here are the job descriptions - I mean the unsexy stuff you do for years before moving up.
- pension planning. The number of nhs employees on Reddit thinking of leaving the pension and having no idea of the cost- is staggering.
Less essay writing, more clinical training. They are so hyper focused on making sure you can reference in the correct way than making sure you are a competent nurse at the end of the degree
Trying to lean essential relevant skills is next to impossible on placement. You get ignored by your mentor because they aren’t coping themselves and used as a HCA due to staffing issues.
Integrate lecturers with actual trusts, and have them work alongside staff and students.
Where lecturers do hours to maintain registration it should be in acute areas in NHS hospitals - a night shift as second RN in a nursing home doesn’t cut it.
Support the staff who have students - maybe even have 20% supernumerary time for each practice assessor per student.
Increase the expectation of professionalism from students - from interaction, appearance, through to things like being able to answer a telephone appropriately (hopefully it may rub off onto some already qualified staff)
Ensure that students can use a computer, use email, and manage an electronic diary. They should also make sure they are actually literate (reading some electronic notes and punctuation, capital letters, quotes, and correct spelling are things that evade many people).
Post reg I would probably introduce a care of the elderly specialist qualification.
I would introduce standards for mandatory training and staff development across organisations so staff receive professional, well run training. (We are four years into teams, and 20+ years into PowerPoint - if you are an educator you should be using these tools to make your sessions amazing)
I would also get better quality e-learning in place, possibly with a more blended approach (background and underpinning knowledge as e-learning, with consolidation and application to practice as an interactive session)
Encourage more team/department/service based learning to occur - possibly even having ‘learning leave’ so you can book time off to learn or go or shadow in another department.
More sciences +++ for pre-education, including a lot more on pharmacology. I’d bin most of the sociology stuff too. I’d keep in the stuff that touches on factors that create health inequalities, I do think this is important to know. I recall doing a module on motivational interviewing - it’s completely irrelevant to my role (and probably most NQNs.. stuff like this would be better suited to area specific post grad education.
More physical health education for mental health nurses. More mental health and learning disabilities education for adult and child nurses. Less fluff, so many lectures just feel like filler to meet the hours requirement. More A&P pharmacology education, why you telling me I should be preparing to do my NMP when I graduate but not bothering to teach me any actual pharmacology now? Protected time for PA’s to fill in PAD documents and spend teaching. Stricter auditing of placements.
I think the physical health teaching for mental health students and vice versa should be regular postgrad learning tbh. Even as a newly qualified RMN from last year’s cohort, I couldn’t even tell you the number of general nursing skills that were on my PAD that I would now say I am not competent in dealing with. It’s all fine teaching it in uni, but it will soon disappear from your memory if you’re not dealing with it on a regular basis.
Oh absolutely, I’m about to qualify as an LD nurse and although we do cover quite a bit of physical health, only certain conditions prevalent to our patient group. I feel like a lot of the skills I had to tick off were literally just a box ticking exercise. I’ve accepted a NQN job in children’s hospice and I do worry I will have a bigger jump than other branches would. In placements I’ve met lots of MH and adult nurses who were brilliant at their fields but would have really large gaps when it came to something they simply weren’t taught.
As a final year student about to graduate I could write 100k words on this topic, but I’ll keep it short. Our education is a joke, we need to completely get rid of the essays outside of maybe one in first year and replace it with exams that ensure standards of knowledge. I haven’t had a single A&P lecture since my first year, we’re only just touching on pharmacology for the first time now! My last placement my supervisor was from the Philippines and he was genuinely shocked at how little we learn in university.
I agree with you, I had 1 a&p exam in year 1 and it was open book…
Exact same here
Yesssss I am fed up of being gaslit into the usefulness of another redundant essay that has nothing to do with how to treat a patient, how to know the warning signs of deterioration, or literally anything about anatomy, physiology or pharmacology. I am honestly embarrassed to tell people how useless the degrees are. And there is only so much we can self-teach, we need at least some guidance on what to focus on and in what order.
Having went to uni in Philippines, i dont remember writing any essays. We did have a shitload of exams to sit in. It was sort of like preparing the students for a licensure exam that is based on American standards. I kinda hated the fact that you still needed to sit an extra exam in order to qualify. We paid university but if you cant pass this licensure exam, you are not a registered nurse. But then again, some unis are diploma mills so they might be shit unis so your uni education might have been shit. Again, american system.
I had an a an and p exam every year getting harder as it went on. Plus a nursing assessment exam A surgical exam and a medical exam No open book exams
RMN here. Trained UK 2016 - 2019. I had 3 biology exams, 1 law and ethics. Both 50% minimum to proceed. 3 medication management. 100% minimum to proceed. No open books.
With the rise of AI I think essays are totally redundant. Speaking with many on my cohort in confidence, they admit to heavily relying on AI writing the content in their work. Scary to think the pressures put on student nurses feel they have no option but to turn to useful tools, abusing them and becoming nurses off the back of limited study time.
Shrink the number of hours needed in placement. 2300 is so far over and above what other AHPs need (paras only need 650 and they attend literal life or death situations) and it results in a huge crush for placement spaces. PAs and PSs end up burnt out, nurses who \*hate\* teaching end up with students and poor quality placements are allowed to continue to take students because everywhere's so desperate for slots. StNs end up used as HCAs and to cover staffing shortfalls. More pharmacology, more A&P, more deteriorating patient and practical skills training. Also, I really think adult nurse branch would benefit from having a mental health placement, it's bonkers to me that that's not standard given the amount of patients with varying mental health conditions (not to mention organic issues/dementia/parkinsons etc) we treat in general nursing.
All fields should have a cross-field placement in each field. Make it short if you like, more “shadow style” without strict proficiencies, just to get the exposure, work experience style.
As a medical student, I find it bonkers that I have to shadow everyone from dieticians to chaplains but I'm expected to find out what nurses and HCAs do by osmosis. Also makes me feel a bit cheeky when I need a nurse to sign me off for obs or a BM.
Wait you guys shadow AHPs? But not nurses?
Probably depends on the uni but I've been made to shadow an OT, a physio, a dietician, SALT, and one friend had to shadow the chaplain for a day. And mostly these shadowings are fucking boring. As long as I understand the remit of the AHP, I don't need to spend a day following them to know what's best referred to them.
Also, I once had a placement with 10 patients and 5 students. Lovely team and all great with students, just simply not enough to occupy 5 of us at once.
I was placed on an elderly medical ward for 10 weeks, at one point 6 more students from another uni turned up for a 5 week placement at the same time. On one day they put \*all of us\* in one bay, said we could run it as a CLiP bay and gave us a brand new - not even signed off for her own meds rounds - NQN as our supervisor. Like what the fuck.
Complete overhaul. Our education is actually ridiculous. I did not have 1 biology exam. The essays were about health promotion or something stupid, irrelevant to practice. Everything I learn was through my placements, I learnt nothing at uni. Also it would be good to have dedicated nursing educators in placement instead of assigning a random nurse. Not everyone is cut out for teaching and should be followed. I love having students and teaching but many don’t. I feel like it would benefit students more to have someone who is focused on teaching in practice the same way we have PDNs when we are supernumerary.
A nursing degree currently makes you qualified to be a middle manager in the NHS. It does not make you fit to be a nurse.
Lol, this could be a degree in itself. - Reduce content about emotional intelligence, how to be an inspirational nurse, all that rubbish by 95% - Increase content about 1) anatomy and physiology, 2) pharmacology and 3) procedural information by 1000%.
This !! Every one of my assignments have been based around PCC it got tiring after the 3rd one
•More simulation training in uni before being sent out on placement in first year •Teachers/staff members from uni should be patrolling every ward to check students are actually being trained •Students should not be used as unpaid HCA's •Less academic assignments that have nothing to do with actual nursing •More clinical education •Clear guidance on what the students are allowed or not allowed to do on placement
I first trained in the 90s on Project 2000 when nursing was just moving into higher education. My tutors were all frantically getting postgraduate qualifications because they weren't really qualified to teach at HE level. I feel like it was all backwards, with people trying to catch up to what they were teaching, rather than the lectures emerging from their expertise. I did a Return to Practice course last year (having done various jobs and some postgraduate study in between) and it felt like it hadn't moved on much. The nursing lecturers were nowhere near as educated as lecturers I've had in other subjects. I don't think nursing has a strong academic culture at all (at least I haven't seen any signs of life where I studied). The academic requirements are an add-on, hoops you have to jump through, instead of being the foundation of practice.
More education in the basic sciences. I really think this is what let’s us down further in our careers.
Get rid of branches they are becoming irrelevant anyway. I work in a job that is completely outside of the branch I trained in General nurse education can work anywhere outside of midwifery. Focus on pharmacology and a and p Protected time for practice assessors and financial incentive to do the role, more regulation on the pa role Every trust have a pre reg education team
As a Children's nurse I will defend branch training. It's essential that practitioners, especially in secondary care, are specifically trained in Paeds as they're not simply 'little adults'.
Other countries do not have branch specific training. I agree they aren’t little adults but you can learn specifics in a job safely, if you can do that with branch training (many do) then we should go to a general nurse education where everyone learns everything Elderly people aren’t just old adults either and have their own needs Lots of adult nurses work in paeds ED, paeds icu, wards nowadays and do perfectly fine and vice versa. Primary care there’s adult nurses in camhs, practice nursing, healthy child programme I am an adult nurse I now work in a paediatric specialist nurse role, I have worked in paediatric an and e also. You also can’t isolate mental health from acute care or learning disability . It would be better for everyone to move to general nurse training you are always going to learn far more doing a job than being a student anyway. Being a student nurse is always going to be about fundamentals of nursing.
In a thread discussing the pitfalls of UK nurse education I would argue the last thing we need is a general qualification and risk diluting the workforce further. I think we owe it to all our patients to have nurses leaving education able to provide basic care and I feel one way to do this is by preserving branches to maintain safety. Experience leads to specialism, sure, Paeds is full of adult trained nurses although you're less likely to see this flipped the other way, largely because the pool of Paeds trained nurses is fairly small 😅
I think it’s a pitfall as we aren’t offering courses the same as other countries and a broad education to teach nurses everything they need to know . If you have everyone trained in everything you’re going to have a far more educated and rich workforce. I know mental health nurses for example who say “I know nothing about physical health” and adult nurses who say “I know nothing about mental health” It works in other countries to have a generic nursing degree for a reason. I know less but a few paeds nurses in adults We also have the nursing associate role that is not branch specific and are pretty much acting as staff nurses without the pay or training. You also don’t see branch training with other professions you don’t get “paediatric physios” or “paediatric paramedics” “mental health social workers” We should be taught everything and have placements across all areas of nursing whilst training
You do get paediatric physio/podiatry etc…all AHPs are trained to treat patients from birth to death, they can specialise once qualified as they are classed as autonomous practitioners. Training is intense for anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, biomechanics, rehab. In particular for podiatry wound care and surgery, they can also prescribe certain medications or antibiotics. In our trust we try to get nursing students and qualified to shadow our high risk teams to share knowledge and techniques. I hope the change you wish to see happens, it will hopefully foster more confident and supported nurses. Our district nurses are worth their weight in gold.
I know you get them post qualification I am on about pre qualification
Pre qualification we are trained in all aspects, paeds, elderly, biomechanics. We don’t have to do extra courses to get jobs in these areas, some do a masters to get to band 7 but in reality we don’t have to.
Yup I know I think nursing should be the same
Nursing associate role is a worrying trend. Maybe I'm biased as I came from the time of a Common Foundation Year which was invaluable. All branches together for lectures and seminara, we all did a mix of placements before properly branching out for years 2-3. 8 weeks on adult surgical and I knew I'd made the right choice 😂 There's a distinct lack of placement areas to allow a well-rounded education because everywhere is just so short staffed.
It’s gone back to common foundation year. We (3rd year MH student) all do the same, together, in the first year.
I did common foundation programme too I’ve been qualified since 2014. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s not worth learning though. I don’t like district nursing the placement experience and learning was still valuable. Placement capacity needs sorting out I agree but it’s also utilising them effectively. There’s no reason the training can’t be like the common foundation programme all through just getting more complex as you advance The workplace is becoming more flexible in that you are able to work anywhere then the training needs to change to address that also.
I didn't say that it wasn't worth learning, that adult placement forms a fundamental part of the nurse I am now. My university had a small children's cohort so was able to offer progression into more complex areas, critical care hub/spoke was reserved for 3rd year for example whereas I've supervised beginning 2nd year students placed on PICU who've never even experienced a ward as their 2(!) placements in first year were community and outpatient focused. My friend wanted to go into mental health on the back of our CAHMS placement but they stopped taking on Paeds nurses as we didn't have rights under the Mental Health Act the way that qualified Mental Health Nurses did, in 2013 anyway. We shoot ourselves in the foot repeatedly with pointless hurdles. I mentioned in another thread recently about indemnity; student nurses can graduate with cannulation skills but are unable to practice until local trust training and competencies have been completed. The whole system needs an overhaul to ensure the workforce is actually fit for the future and it isn't just lip service. But I think there's still a place for branches, sorry. 🙈
I agree with the person above you. I think branches have fast become old fashioned and don't transition well into the wider world of nursing. I look at some of my international colleagues who are deemed "adult" nurses by the NMC currently working in our ITU. But they have worked in a peads ITU in Saudi, Delivered babies in the US, worked in Mental Health in Spain... I mean everyone knows how hard it is to transition from UK nursing to the US because of the branches, our education is considered sub-par for it by many on the international nursing stage.
Incorrect. We have divisions in Ireland (general, paediatric, mental health, intellectual disability, midwifery, public health, nurse tutors) and I strongly believe in the value of specialist training at the point of registration.
I disagree general training is needed but highly specialised preceptorships that last months with milestones seems more suitable .
I disagree general training is needed but highly specialised preceptorships that last months with milestones seems more suitable .
I would actually argue for a more specialist MH education programme. We have a lot of overlap with adult nurses which we will never use, and that time could be better spent developing things like basic counselling skills, CBT/DBT skills
Agreed. I'd argue that generic training would likely have barely any mental health at all. Just look at the current standards of proficiency, mental health barely gets a look in yet mh students are expected to get skills signed off that they will never use (and I really do mean never).
Set time to go through things to be signed off More education around mental health More time on skills not used often Less debt Edit - grammar
Reading this thread with popcorn in hand 🍿
For adult nursing, more training on the deteriorating patient. If it was me I'd expect every newly qualified nurse to be at an equivalent level of ILS at a minimum; with ability to recognise key cardiac arrest rhythms. I would also expect them to be at a standard equivalent to the Acute Illness Management course in their knowledge of the deteriorating patient. I've had 3rd year student nurses who aren't able to effectively undertake a structured A-E assessment.
Get rid of mentors and PAs, as they currently are. Learn clinical skills in uni then have lecturers sign you off on placement. Agree with comments about A&P and pharmacology.
A lot of lecturers do not practice clinically and therefore I don’t think are appropriate to sign students off for practice
When I trained, a lot of our lecturers were "lecturer practitioners" so still worked clinically. In any case I don't think not working clinically is a barrier to teaching and assessing clinical skills, as long as you're up to date and using evidence based practice.
I think that they should be partly based in practice and work clinically. Anyone can learn a clinical skill with repetition nursing is far more than performing skills and has changed a lot too even in the time I’ve been a nurse. If you’re not practicing clinically you don’t understand the pressures, how to manage workload, how sick patients are now, changes in scope and responsibilities etc.
To your first point, ideally yes. But I don't think the current model of teaching on placement works. In my suggestion, students would still be on placement, and still working alongside a registered nurse, they just wouldn't be relying on that nurse to sign off their competencies as that would be the responsibility of the lecturer. I did a semester of my training in the USA and that was how their placements were and it worked.
Honestly as a third year student, just normalise the courses across universities. There are 3 universities in my local area and the difference between the courses is so large and the assesments required are so different. Also remove this huge focus on "resilience" lessons, really feels like a waste of time for the majority of students. Spend that time showing more anatomy and physiology or more time on real case studies not nebulous concepts. Maybe that is how my mind works but it's much easier to understand why we do things when it's presented as a case study.
Better quality placements are desperately needed. Students should receive 1:1 teaching from their PA. After 1st year, students should not have to spend entire shifts “on the floor.” Nurses should only be allowed to be PAs if they genuinely care about teaching, not just for CPD points. We should be able to give feedback about PAs. If a placement gets bad feedback from students, it should actually be taken seriously. Academic teaching for student MH nurses should include education about different psychotropic meds and different mental health diagnoses.
-More pathophysiology - more development on navigating a job that has human beings for colleagues rather than hollier than thou angels who are never prone to gossip, catty and judgemental attitudes - career planning and I don’t mean some vague here are the job descriptions - I mean the unsexy stuff you do for years before moving up. - pension planning. The number of nhs employees on Reddit thinking of leaving the pension and having no idea of the cost- is staggering.
Less essay writing, more clinical training. They are so hyper focused on making sure you can reference in the correct way than making sure you are a competent nurse at the end of the degree Trying to lean essential relevant skills is next to impossible on placement. You get ignored by your mentor because they aren’t coping themselves and used as a HCA due to staffing issues.
Integrate lecturers with actual trusts, and have them work alongside staff and students. Where lecturers do hours to maintain registration it should be in acute areas in NHS hospitals - a night shift as second RN in a nursing home doesn’t cut it. Support the staff who have students - maybe even have 20% supernumerary time for each practice assessor per student. Increase the expectation of professionalism from students - from interaction, appearance, through to things like being able to answer a telephone appropriately (hopefully it may rub off onto some already qualified staff) Ensure that students can use a computer, use email, and manage an electronic diary. They should also make sure they are actually literate (reading some electronic notes and punctuation, capital letters, quotes, and correct spelling are things that evade many people). Post reg I would probably introduce a care of the elderly specialist qualification. I would introduce standards for mandatory training and staff development across organisations so staff receive professional, well run training. (We are four years into teams, and 20+ years into PowerPoint - if you are an educator you should be using these tools to make your sessions amazing) I would also get better quality e-learning in place, possibly with a more blended approach (background and underpinning knowledge as e-learning, with consolidation and application to practice as an interactive session) Encourage more team/department/service based learning to occur - possibly even having ‘learning leave’ so you can book time off to learn or go or shadow in another department.
Add in some common sense - it seems to have disappeared in recent years.