I spent a number of years as a Ward Sister working on wards, working alongside patients,
developing my experience, my knowledge base.
I feel absolutely passionate about nursing and although I wanted to continue working
with patients I felt that my career should progress towards education.
This is the skills lab where we have students who come in to practice clinical skills.
These students are doing a degree in nursing so they’re doing a bachelor of science in
nursing.
All nursing in England is going across to degree status from 2013 but we were one of
the very first universities that have been asked to run the course from 2011.
And what we do here at Kingston University is that we actually set up simulated exercises
which actually bring in role players so they’re working alongside people who can provide them
with feedback.
We also get the professional nurses who come in who are actually working out in the real
world.
The students feel that when they walk into that simulated exercise that it feels like
reality, like a real ward.
I’m just going to tell you a little bit about those patients there and then I’m
going to hand over, we’ll get you organised into pairs and then you’ll work with the
patients and we’ll give you a bit more handover as we get to the clients.
None of the role players actually have any formalised acting but they’ve developed
their scenarios.
Mrs Bennet has been with us for quite some time, for about 3 days now, she came with
a chest infection and we’ve treated her with intravenous antibiotics...
And what the students should be picking up is that although she’s had some treatment
she’s not really had very much confidence in herself and she needs to be moved along
quite quickly.
In the middle bed is Joy Person, this lady has just returned from theatre, she came into
A&E and they diagnosed that she had appendicitis...
And the students need to now be able to care for her in that sort of post operative period.
And then we had a third person, a gentleman who’d fallen over this morning and had fractured
one of his large bones, his femur so students will managing that patient with a fracture.
[Sue organises the students and assigns them different patients to looks after]
Clinical practice is a highly stressed area, making mistakes is not what we want them to
do but in the labs hopefully they feel safe enough in order to push themselves forward
to actually practise skills that they perhaps wouldn’t take on in the real world and there’s
real learning there for the students.
[The students practice their skills]
You will find that other students perhaps at other universities will not experience
the type of simulation that we provide for our students.
We can use mannequins but a mannequin doesn’t give feedback, it doesn’t say ow or that
was sore.
What we want the students to see is the best practice so we film the exercise, select certain
clips and then put it on to study space for students to actually view, it’s ideal to
be able to show students this is the type of quality care we would expect them to be
able to provide for their patients.
[The student answers the phone]
The phoning is so important, students need to understand that they need to answer the
phones correctly, they need to say who they are, they need to liaise really between the
person who’s on the phone who’s desperate for information and want to know how their
loved one is but also the patient in bed who may be thinking, oh thank goodness what I
need is my slippers, please bring in my dressing gown as well because I haven’t got that
or I want some orange juice could they bring that and they can give that information.
Student: Well, I’ve got a message from her, she said to me that she is looking forward
to seeing you; she’s very well at the moment so you can visit her at any time.
You always spend such a lot of time developing those clinical skills and those simulation
exercises and then when the students come in, you can just see the growth in them and
that they feel so confident when they go out and it’s excitement in their own faces that,
like the student today who could suddenly for the first time has actually managed to
hear that blood pressure, that’s significant for her, she will take that away with her.
And instead of just focussing on doing the blood pressure, next time round she’ll be
able to speak to the patient rather than just focussing on the skills.
I get a real passion for this, I think it is seeing the growth of the student from a
first year through to a third year, from somebody who felt quite novice at the beginning who
feels quite anxious, not sure even how to introduce themselves to a patient, to somebody
you feel, who walks into the labs you can see leadership, you can see decision making
skills that they’ve developed over those three years.