Nursing changing to graduate-only entry
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Independent Minds
All nurses will need to be educated to degree level from 2013, the Government announced today.
At present, nurses receive a diploma after two or three years of training but they will now have to complete three or four years to obtain a degree.
The move is as a result of changes in recent years to the way nurses work, including handling more advanced levels of practice, prescribing and working in specialist disease areas, such as diabetes.
Nursing courses will match up to new a set of standards set out by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and will include more practical experience outside of hospitals.
Current training involves a combination of theoretical and practical work but the new standards, which are open to consultation, will include a focus on students gaining experience in community health teams.
Trainees will also shadow school health nurses and district nurses who work with people in their own homes.
Health Minister, Ann Keen, said: "Nurses are the largest single profession within the health service, and are critical to the delivery of high quality health care.
"By bringing in degree-level registration we can ensure new nurses have the best possible start to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
"This is the right direction of travel if we are to fulfil our ambition to provide higher quality care for all."
Chief nursing officer, Christine Beasley, said: "More young people than ever are studying for a degree and this will make nursing more attractive to them.
"Degree-level nurse education will be supported by a national framework for preceptorship which will ensure that new nurses have the support they need to make the transition to confident practitioner."
Dr Peter Carter, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), said: "This is an important and historic development, which the RCN has been in support of for many years.
"All nurses need to put quality care at the centre of what they do, and they also need extensive knowledge, analytical skills and experience to work in a range of settings.
"Many nursing roles are demanding and involve increasingly advanced levels of practice and clinical knowledge.
"This is not about restricting entry to the nursing profession, in fact we must ensure that the door to nursing continues to be as wide as possible.
"Students must also be properly supported to continue in their studies.
"Above all, we need a nurse education system which encourages the best entrants to pursue a career in care."
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Comments
In fact, nurses are ceasing to be carers, that is increasingly being ignored and left for others. Junior nurses being trained on the wards used to carry out that function which was an essential part of their training; but now they go to universities instead and the patients suffer.
Technology and targets are wonderful things; but hospitals are not businesses or factories.
Project 2000 brought in this higly contraversial change from continuing assessment to virtually all theory and class studies.
And now the last vestiges of any attempt to expose the students to hands on experience will be gone because the hospitals are not going to want to put up with the situation as it is proposed.
I took my RMN at Warley Hospital in Essex after leaving the Army, it was a superbly crafted course balancing essential coursework with very real hands on experience, not one nurse I know or talk to supports this move to full coursework and would rather see the old tutelage system brought back.
And I fail to see what 3 or 4 years in university can actually achieve over the old pupil or student nurse schemes, nursing is a finite realm and there is only so much theory one can learn, only so many books one can read, and on day one of completion of their courses, these people are going to go onto the ward waving their magic pieces of paper and not know a damned thing.
But has no one worked out why this is happening...? Its money, its switching the training costs from the state to the prospective nurse, forcing nursing back into its middle class origin and denying it from those from lesser well off families whilst getting people who can do the doctors work on the cheap.
Bring back continuing assessment, it is the best option all round
Patients left unattended, dirty toilets, unsanitary conditions etc.
So the answer to this is... make ALL nurses Degree level educated?
There was a time when the nursing profession was predominantly vocational, but now it is a business and career choice. The Wages are attractive, as is the Grade structure for promotion and advancement, so we have thousands of nurses who are well educated academically, and motivated lustily by the prospect of better than average wages as well as job titles that sound like they were invented by some tin-pot government pedant.
Excuse me, but, what about "care" ?
If it requires a team of designers from Gucci to style the new uniform, and an army of suits and headscratchers to make sure the wards are laid out according to feng Shui, and the nurses are all busy studying "modern management in patient expediency", then its hardly likely to attract people who dont mind scrubbing metal beds with water and bleach and mopping up vomit or tending to some poor old geezer who pooped and wet his pants.
It`s little wonder that the Health Service is in crisis when 95% of its employees either dont know, or dont want to know, what it`s like to sit and hold the hand of a scared patient or remember their names without checking a chart.... but it is comforting to know that the self same 95% of employees could sit and hold forth on Nietsche or plot the tangent and cosine of any given trajectory of a parabola.
(yes, I know that last sentence is gobbledygook , I`m using poetic licence)
Care?
Dont care, more like.
And playing further and further into the hands of "education" merely as business...
And of course, as has been mentioned, this will probably end up with nurses without practical skills, if their training does not involve any ward time.