Promoting transition resilience through personal development planning : an evaluation of the perspectives of preparation for transition of final year undergraduate nursing students

The experience of transition is of concern to newly registered nurses entering the world of work, and to those seeking to prepare, recruit and retain such nurses. This paper evaluates a final year preparation for role transition module from the perspectives of final year student nurses. Focus groups and one to one interviews were carried out at three distinct points in time, after the module assessments and after each of the three clinical placements in the final year. Braun and Clarke’s inductive thematic analysis was used to analyse the data with four themes emerging: impact/relevance of the personal development plan; development of self; role of the mentor; and transition resilience/taking control. These four themes were then applied to Kirkpatrick’s model of evaluation, providing a deductive or theoretical framework for analysing and evaluating the outcomes of the module. Preparation for transition and the development of resilience have been identified as a potential solution associated with the negative experiences and challenges of transition. Resilience is an essential attribute that enables nurses to make sense of their experiences of transition and manage the stress of the work place. Creating transition focused personal development plans to guide learning in the final year enabled the participants to take responsibility for their own learning and with the support from a good mentor, participants were able to understand that feeling nervous about transition was normal. This in turn enhanced their confidence, promoting ‘transition resilience’ as opposed to feelings and experiences associated with the more traditional concept of transition or reality shock. Key Words: role transition, transition resilience, transition module, reality shock, transition focused personal development pla

SONIC Students Online in Nursing Integrated Curricula A reflective account of a teaching and learning journey

Why develop online resources for problem-based learning? PBL is a pedagogy which requires students to seek resources for themselves. Providing students with easily accessible resources must surely run counter to the philosophy. PBL is first and foremost a strategy for learning; its overriding purpose is to assist learners to acquire, not only factual knowledge, but the transferable learning, critical thinking, and reflective skills necessary for professional life. PBL is thus ideally suited to the education of nurses.In nurse education a tension exists between the need to develop critical thinking skills and the requirement to acquire, simultaneously, the clinical proficiencies set by the Nursing and Midwifery Council. Meeting these demands within the time frame of an undergraduate nursing programme presents a considerable challenge. This monograph details the journey of the SONIC project group as they met this challenge, maximising student study time by combining the benefits offered by PBL with online resources targeted to topics which nursing students traditionally find difficult. At journey’s end their resources, offered freely, without the barrier of complex entry procedures, fit not only with the programmes run by the four partner institutions and other Schools of Nursing but also with programmes offered by other health care discipline

The PREDICTS database: A global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts

© 2014 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species' threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project - and avert - future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups - including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems - www.predicts.org.uk). We make site-level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015. The collation of biodiversity datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents is necessary to understand historical declines and to project - and hopefully avert - future declines. We describe a newly collated database of more than 1.6 million biodiversity measurements from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world