'Ready to hit the ground running': alumni and employer accounts of a unique part-time distance learning pre-registration nurse education programme

Background This study explored the impact of The Open University’s (OU) pre-registration nursing programme on students’ employability, career progression and its contribution to developing the nursing workforce across the United Kingdom. Designed for healthcare support workers who are sponsored by their employers, the programme is the only part-time supported open/distance learning programme in the UK leading to registration as a nurse. The international literature reveals that relatively little is known about the impact of previous experience as a healthcare support worker on the experience of transition, employability skills and career progression. Objectives To identify alumni and employer views of the perceived impact of the programme on employability, career progression and workforce development. Design/Method A qualitative design using telephone interviews which were digitally recorded, transcribed verbatim prior to content analysis to identify recurrent themes. Settings Three geographical areas across the UK. Participants Alumni (n=17) and employers (n=7). Inclusion criterion for alumni was a minimum of two years post-qualifying experience. Inclusion criteria for employers were those that had responsibility for sponsoring students on the programme and employing them as newly qualified nurses. Results Four overarching themes were identified: Transition, Expectations, Learning for and in practice, and Flexibility. Conclusions Alumni and employers were of the view that the programme equipped them well to meet the competencies and expectations of being a newly qualified nurse. It provided employers with a flexible route to growing their own workforce and alumni the opportunity to achieve their ambition of becoming a qualified nurse when other more conventional routes would not have been open to them. Some of them had already demonstrated career progression. Generalising results requires caution due to the small, self-selecting sample but findings suggest that a widening participation model of pre-registration nurse education for employed healthcare support workers more than adequately prepares them for the realities of professional practice

Service user perspectives about their roles in undergraduate medical training about mental health

Background: Current policy states that ‘service users and carers should be involved in planning, providing and evaluating training for all health care professionals. We wished to explore service users’ views regarding undergraduate psychiatry. Aims: We aimed to explore user perspectives on the specific role of service users in the delivery of teaching psychiatry. Method: The study design was qualitative and used focus groups. The study took place in a community context with one focus group in Leeds, Leicester, Lincoln and Nottingham. Four focus groups were run with a total of 28 participants (16 women and 12 men, all white). No exclusion criteria were applied. The lead of each group were contacted and they then recruited volunteers from their membership. Results: The key findings were that participants felt that service users could play important roles in contextualising the part mental health plays in people’s lives; dispel myths and fantasies about mental health; offer positive aspects of mental health to counterbalance the media; illustrate diversity within mental health and hope and recovery. Participants also identified the potential challenges to their participation including vulnerabilities especially at critical points in people’s illnesses; perceived credibility – lack of support from some involved in academic roles; lack of appropriate training and support and issues of power and lack of genuine partnership in the planning and delivery of teaching. They were favourable about the development of guidelines as long as they involved a range of perspectives. Conclusions: Service users present a range of ways in which they could be involved to enhance the educational experience of medical students in psychiatry

Service user perspectives on the content of the undergraduate curriculum in psychiatry

Aims and method: To explore user perspectives on the content and delivery of the undergraduate curriculum in psychiatry. The study design was qualitative and used focus groups. Four focus groups were run with a total of 28 participants. Results: The key finding was that participants were clearer about the attitudes they felt students should convey than they were about the skills and knowledge required. Clinical implications: Service user perspectives on the content of the undergraduate psychiatry curriculum need to be considered as curricula are developed

Generalizing from workplace ethnographies - from induction to theory

Two modes of generalizing from the large set of workplace ethnographies now in existence are compared. These are the results of the Workplace Ethnography (WE) data set and holistic modeling (HM) based on a more theoretically driven project. In the treatment of specific cases, there is impressive complementarity between the two. But the WE data fail to capture some key features of leading studies, because they do not treat cases holistically. They might also be developed by including studies not included to date. A more explicit theoretical approach offers some firmer grounds for generalizing, and new directions for comparative ethnographies arise