Accessing specialist nurse roles on placement

Carpenter-Timmis, Clare

Clare Carpenter-Timmis is adult nurse lecturer, University of Essex, and North East London Foundation Trust placement link lecturer; Beth Maryon is senior practice improvement practitioner, North East London Foundation Trust.

5 key points

1 Accessing specialist nurses for placement provision can be beneficial for both students and staff

2 Placement provision is key to students’ pre-registration education

3 The challenges of the changing health economy have altered the availability and suitability of placements

4 Placement providers and higher education institutions need to be creative to provide placement capacity

5 This framework could be used for various nursing placement areas to create additional capacity and increase placement time

Nursing Times 112(4):p 20-22, January 27, 2016.

This article has been double-blind peer reviewed

Students need to understand specialist nurse roles, so a university and placement provider developed a placement framework give them access to these nurses

In this article…

Difficulties accessing specialist nurse roles on placement

Implementing a pilot framework to address the issue

Feedback on the pilot

It is important that clinical placements provide students with experience of working in a wide range of settings and nursing roles. However, the duration of some placements that involve specialist nurses is too short to allow education establishments to adequately assess their students in line with Nursing and Midwifery Council guidelines. This has a negative effect on the development of students, nursing research teams and mentors. This article describes a framework devised by one university in an attempt to address the issue with one of its placement providers and improve students’ access to specialist nursing roles while on placement.