The School of Nursing is the largest school within the faculty of health, social care
and education and it is across two sites: it's based at St George's and it's also based
on the Kingston Hill site.
Kingston and St George's joint faculty is consistently rated at the top of the Guardian League Tables.
We offer a range of workforce development education that makes our provision unique.
We offer four fields of nursing, that is adult nursing, children's nursing, mental health
nursing and learning disability nursing.
We're really proud of our programmes and the quality of that provision. We're proud because
our students leave the programme as registered nurses where employers want to employ you.
97 per cent of our students gain employment for six months after registering.
Our facilities offer you a number of opportunities to learn basic nursing skills, to even advance skills, and
you will progressively build on those skills as you move from your first year to your third year.
We also offer students the opportunity to work with those who have mental health problems, out in the field.
You will be taught by those who have had, or still have, a mental health problem,
and you will work with a recovery college to learn about the service users' experience.
The distinctive features that we hold here within our mental health nursing course are
additional to the wide programmes that the students have here. There's some very exciting
opportunities here for students, the first being is that we developed a partnership with
the recovery college which are based at the South West London St George's NHS Trust which
is an organisation that works with service users and people that have experienced mental
health problems and it helps to educate the public, service users and clinicians.
It's a very exciting partnership that we have and the students have access to that.
The mental health nursing team is enthusiastic about their teaching. Indeed they actually
won the Student Nursing Time Award in 2012 for the outstanding innovation in teaching practice.
The mental health simulation programme that we run here at Kingston University allows
us to provide students with a wide array of live actual practice so students have live
examples of teaching and using the skills of the mental health nursing with our actors,
who are well established and have been running the course here for over ten years.
"OK guys, the patients that you're going to be working with are coming in later today.
The important exercise we need to conduct now is group discussion on preparation for the work we'll be doing with those patients."
The mental health simulations that we do here at Kingston involve getting to know patients.
You get time to prepare, you consider all the possible risks and their diagnoses and
then you actually meet the patients. Actors come in and present all kinds of different behaviour.
"She's been in and out of hospital since the age of 19 and is now in hospital because of
a serious assault on a member of the community team when she was very unwell."
"She has twice assaulted other patients and once hit a nurse, saying each incident that she felt out of control."
"Today she's told a HGA that she's been thinking of assaulting a nurse."
It's probably the best kind of learning without actually being on the ward because you have
to think on your feet, for learning, for coming away with an element of achieving something,
I think simulations are second to none.
It's a really great way of testing your skills and getting them wrong and messing up completely
but learning from other students and lecturers and tweaking how you say things to people
and then the actors will respond to you and you can see what sort of progress you make.
Modern day mental health nursing really has two strands to its purpose. First of all is
to work alongside other professionals and other service-using families in helping people
overcome severe mental health problems and psychological distress. The second part for
mental health nursing is very much the importance of preventing mental health problems in the
public and in the community.
What I find rewarding about mental health nursing is the people you meet, the colleagues
that you work with and the chance to relieve distress and so on, and also put a smile on their face.