Nursing is a very diverse career and it gives you the opportunity to stay in
clinical practice which is incredibly rewarding but it has great diversity so
you can go up and do research and you can become an academic or you can go
into education and be teaching and you can teach in practice where you can
teach in the university. But it's all about improving the patient experience
and therefore it's very enriching very rewarding and I thoroughly recommend it as a career.
Nursing has given me the tools the knowledge and the experience
to go out there to pursue that work which I wanted to do.
The placements are really good they varied them from acute placements, medical placements and surgical placements. Very broad.
I'd say always go and get a little bit of experience first of all to make sure
it's the subject that you want to pursue because obviously you have to have the
compassion element there It's something that you need to want to do rather than just studying it for a course.
Brighton University will give you those tools to do that but you have to be very pro-active in your learning there.
You know you can't expect to be spoon-fed but it's a good place.
and there's lots of support there if you need it.
I'm pretty sure that the
contacts that I've made on placement will help me to find a job almost
immediately after leaving because we've got placement over the whole three years
in all the different settings that I've been in, I've made friends with someone
that will help my career progression
The best advice for the students who study nursing is get to know the people that are actually on the course with
maintain those relationships as you might need support throughout the course so - and enjoy it!
All different sort of professions that you come across within nursing you
have to work with each other and of course with the patients as well so I
think it's taught me a lot about relationship building.
So the best thing about studying children's nursing was the support that we got from all our mentors on placement and in practice.
I think the variety that the course gives you you're constantly
in placement and there's no block placement so it's you're in uni and
placement at the same time, which I think gives you a lot of continuity with your
learning it's not like you're just stepping in and out of education and practice though it's good.
It's given me a much firmer idea of where I want to take my
career and the sector that I want to go into it's opened my eyes to the charity
sector, independent sector, as well as the NHS it opens everything that the
university throws at you because it throws a lot of stuff at you and it's
brilliant stuff if you can keep rolling with it then you'll learn a lot about
yourself and a lot about the world around you.
Here at our school we can offer all pre-qualifying students the opportunity
to undertake a placement abroad. I'd like to introduce you to Paula Dema our senior lecturer
who's responsible for managing these placements. So Paula can
tell me what your key role is? My role is to help to support the students who have
decided to undertake the exchanges, to liaise with our partners in the other
countries and to help students get the most out of the experience.
I think that it makes me more open-minded about the different health care systems that are
available and throughout Europe , especially in Denmark obviously
and I think ultimately that has made me more open-minded about potentially
finding a job outside of England and it's not all about the UK even though you're studying here.
And where do we send our students? We've got more than 26
partners across Europe so there's quite a varied experience for them to be had
there and we've also got partnerships in Australia and also America.
They provided us with accommodation and also they found the placement for us so like
in regards to some other universities they don't always make those
arrangements so you're left to your own devices so I think there was a lot of support in regards to that.
And when you see the students come back to the UK
what differences do you see? Well obviously enthusiasm and excitement
about what they've experienced and then we try to help them to unpick that and
then they start to see things like how internationalisation of health is
and also their place as a nurse internationally, rather than looking inward just at their own country.
It made me grow both personally and like
professionally in regards to like you're out there for 3 months and
there's also different like barriers that you will come across and I think
that ultimately it made you more versatile to experiences that you had
and also professionally obviously seeing the differences in healthcare was fantastic really.