arrow_back_ios View all videos

ONCAMPUS Experts Talk: Preparation for Registered Nursing Practice at UCLan

Wendy Sinclair (RN Child), Interim Principal Lecturer UCLan:

Preparation for Registered Nursing Practice as an international students in the UK. So, what is it like to be a nurse in the UK? Well, we are a regulated profession and our professional regulatory body is the Nursing and Midwifery council. So every nurse must be registered with the Nursing and Midwifery council and you'll get that registration at the end of your completion of program. Nursing provides a really diverse range of career options and our biggest employer here in the UK is, of course, the National Health Service. We've had this huge increase in nurses joining the register from across the globe, which demonstrates really rich diversity of our nursing workforce and as a student, you'll learn from those people. So again, we've got that brilliant, rich tapestry of diversity within our nursing workforce.

In the UK, we have four different fields of practice. So we have adult nursing, mental health nursing, children and young people's nursing and learning disability nursing. Whichever route you choose, you will get a nursing qualification at the end and your nursing qualification allows you to work with people within those groups. These are our entry requirements at UCLan. So what we ask for is, if you want to do adult nursing or mental health nursing, then you need a minimum of 96 UCAS points, which is the equivalent of three C's at any level. For children's nursing, we ask a little bit more. We want 112 UCAS points. It's really competitive, children's nursing. We get lots of applications and it's a very attractive course. So you must have maths and you must have English at GCSE minimum grade C or level 4 or equivalent. So Maths and English are absolutely essential and we also ask for IELTS at 6.5. Whether you do adult nursing or children's nursing, then you would definitely need a personal statement and an interview. If you already had a degree and you wanted to do a Master's degree instead, then your degree would need to be health related. So you may have done something like health and social care, psychology. Your health related degree needs to be a minimum of a 2:2 classification, and you will need to have relevant work experience in a caring environment. It could be in a hospital, it could be a hospice, as long as you can demonstrate that you've got some relevant work experience in a caring environment. Now, the difference with the Master's programme is that, it's only two years. You will  give us recognition of prior learning for year one, which is why we're asking for a health related degree and work experience in a caring environment. So that should then map across to show us that you've covered everything that we would teach you in year one and you would join at year two, so that would just be a two year programme.

So what we've got is three campuses. We have Preston, Burnley and Westlakes, and you can do adult nursing at all three of those campuses. So Preston is perhaps the most central and then we've got Burnley, which is a little bit further out, and then Westlakes, which is up in the Lake District, which is a beautiful, beautiful place. Children and Young People, however, we only do at Preston. For the Master's programme, you have to do thatat Preston campus and that is a September start. Whichever campus you stay on, you've got the same access to all facilities.

So this is how the BSc course runs. Your course, has to comprise of 2,300 hours of theory and 2,300 hours of clinical practice. So you'll have a block in university, a block of clinical placement, and then come back to university, go back for another block of clinical placement. So you have blocks of placements two or three times a year. So some will be in hospital and some will be on medical wards or surgical wards but you may also get placements in the community. So you may be working with health visitors, community nurses, lots of different areas where you'll get to have lots of different experiences. While the Nursing and Midwifery council have standards on your assessment and supervision, in practice, you can learn from so many of the people when you're out on practice placements. So year one is all about society, health and nursing care. So we look at things within year one around social determinants of health, what impacts upon health? And we look at some of those fundamental elements of nursing care. In year two, it's split into two parts, so the first year is all about acute nursing care within your field of practice. So when adults become unwell, then you need to learn how to care for an unwell adult. If an adult has been unwell for a long time, you'll learn about chronic adult nursing. In year three, you'll go on to learn about research and innovation for nursing practice and within that year, you will look at leadership, you'll look at management, you'll look at change, you'll look at how to challenge people, how to challenge services, risk and quality of care and your placements are designed to match up with the modules that you undertake. So that you can really put theory back into practice and you can join the two together. So we have at UCLan, clinical skills training suites and the Nursing and Midwifery council have declared that 300 of your clinical hours can be undertaken as simulation. So we use our clinical skills training suites to do just that. So you'll be learning in a safe environment and be able to take those skills with you, when you go out to clinical placement.

We've got 38,000 people within our community at UCLan, so we've got a wide range of facilities and supports. Every single student has got access to this huge team of trained counsellors, well-being advisors and mental health advisors. There's a huge, dedicated team around inclusivity, so for students with a disability or learning difficulty, we have lots of support within our service, which is called The Eye. So you can go to them, and they will sign post you and put you in the right direction, whether that be for financial support, health and wellbeing, support or just some advice. We also have a very active Student Union who help and support us with our student welfare as well and we also have a really good team of student ambassadors and nurse ambassadors who are students here at the university and are able to help and assist and advise with any queries that you might have, because sometimes it's better to ask a student because they've got a different perspective on things. Last year, we were number one in the student welfare league table. So we spend a lot of money on our student well-being services because we do believe that if our students are well, our students are happy, they will learn and they will succeed. So we have a really active health research department at UCLan. We have the Institute for Global health and well being. We undertake here at UCLan, lots of research on stroke, midwifery, cancer care, all of those things that filter down into our education. So our teaching and learning is always based on new research that's coming through all the time from our university.

The job market in the UK is excellent currently. So for qualifying student nurses, because we've got so many vacancies nationwide, 99-100% of our UCLan graduates are employed in the profession within six months after qualification. Most of our nurses are offered jobs before they finish the course, and most of our nurses will finish the course one week and start their new jobs the week after. And most of our student nurses can choose where they want to work because of the huge number of vacancies that we do have, our students are able to accept jobs in the areas that they want to work in, which again, is absolutely brilliant. So band five staff nurse is currently starts on a salary of £24,907, with the potential to earn up to £30,615. If you've worked night shifts or weekends, then you'll get extra pay for that. So salary you do need to think about obviously, and take that into consideration when you're making your choices, and the potential for earnings is pretty good. So just bear in mind that the NHS isn't the only employer. There are lots of other employers within the UK.

Just at the end there, there are some links for you to find out more. Well, that's everything from me this morning.

Thank you again for your time Wendy, thank you again.

You're welcome. Hope to see you all soon.