The Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has agreed the next steps for its pre-registration practice learning review.
At a Council meeting today, the regulator was given the greenlight on five key lines of enquiry to better measure the quality of students’ practice learning.
These include plans to evaluate the nursing curriculum and to expand the support that the NMC offers to students, including those with protected characteristics.
This comes after the NMC published a report into practice learning requirements for nursing and midwifery students.
The review, commissioned by the NMC and published by the Nuffield Trust, was produced with support from the Florence Nightingale Foundation (FNF) to identify what contributes to effective practice learning across the UK and in other countries.
The report found inconsistencies in how practice requirements are interpreted and recommended clearer communication around standards to support consistency of practice learning among students, approved education institutions, and practice learning partners.
As part of its ongoing review into practice learning, the five key lines of enquiry agreed by Council today are to:
- Further examine the practice learning experiences of students with protected characteristics (including those who require reasonable adjustments) to understand whether these are taken into account as part of students’ learning, and whether they impact student retention
- Expand the type of support we offer to students, practice supervisors and practice assessors, including strengthening requirements for protected learning time for nursing associate students
- Develop indicators and metrics to measure the quality of students’ practice learning as part of our education quality assurance function. This will help us to understand where we can better support students to achieve the proficiencies they need to deliver the best care for people
- Evaluate key aspects of the midwifery curricula to understand midwifery students’ practice learning experiences, including what works well and what could be improved. This will help us to understand how they can be best supported to achieve their midwifery specific proficiencies, for example, number of births
- Evaluate key aspects of nursing curricula including what works well and what could be improved. This will help us to understand nursing students’ relationships with our education standards, and how they can be best supported to achieve the proficiencies within their intended field of nursing.
Sam Donohue, NMC assistant director for the national and regional outreach service, told Council today that practice learning is taking place in ‘highly pressurised environments’, with requirements that are ‘leading to anxiety for students’, and sometimes promote a task-oriented, rather than a holistic approach to care.
‘If people are being nursed in corridors, there are students there. Overcrowded prisons, there are students there. We have students in all of our pressurised environments,’ she said.
Anne Trotter, NMC assistant director of education and standards, said pressures on registered nurses was also undermining the practice learning support that these nurses can offer students.
‘The system pressures that are being felt by professionals on the register is also being felt by students who are there in a learning capacity, and the professionals who support those students are obviously being pulled in different directions,’ she said.
‘They’re there to protect the public and deliver optimal care, but they’re also there to safely support and supervise students.’
Last September, the NMC published a report evaluating simulated practice learning for pre-registration nursing programmes.
Also in September, the latest data from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) revealed that number of students accepted onto UK nursing programmes had fallen for a third year in a row.
