January 26, 2010, by Teaching at Nottingham

Transferring learning between placements

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Alison: “The students are all used to working in hospital settings or institutional settings, and this is their first time out and about, working with clients in their own homes, or clients coming in from the community for rehabilitation. And to them it’s almost like, well these are Specialist Nurses, I can’t do this because they don’t see that they can transfer some of those skills from what – where they’ve already been and start participating in some of this care, even if they can’t be fully responsible for it.”

Ochala: “Each placement has got its own mix and they are not all the same. Even, like my last placement was a District Nurse placement and this current one is Discharge Team and I’m like district nursing, discharge. Initially, when I saw it, it didn’t make any sense to me and I couldn’t write my goals from the previous placement because I’m like, I don’t even know what I’m going to expect or what I’m going to meet there.

“Your health and safety is the same everywhere. You have to know what to do. Your fire risk – I mean, your fire safety is the same everywhere, ’cause they all have almost similar layouts and they all do the same thing when it gets to evacuating patients. Then your infection control is the same, you always have to wash your hands, so – but there are some, just slight differences in some other areas.”

Review meeting

Pam: “Yeah. But this is transferring your skills, your judgement and knowledge that you’ve picked up. So is working in the district the same as working here, in A and E, ED? ”

Ochala: “No, it’s quite different, because, with ED, you have different people coming through the door, every day, but with the district nursing, it’s a caseload, they been seeing those patients constantly and just go and do the dressing, but, the common thing is they have got elderly people.”

Learning set meeting

Annie: “A bit like the menu we went through, ’cause heart attack patients go on Aspirin, Clopidrogel, a betablocker, ACE, and a Statin. Everybody should be on that unless they’re contrindicated one way or the other. So like, that’s your bog standard menu, isn’t it?”

Jo: “Yes, that’s right. Yeah, and with the Statins I was – my first placement was on a stroke ward and a lot of people with strokes were on the Statins, so I transferred and I immediately knew what that was for it was for cholesterol.”

Alison: “I think the common principle is health promotion and the role of the Nurse, and how that is driven by Government policy and how that effects how the people access and use services and how Nurses make people aware that they can use and access services.”

Annie Byng, Alison Clark, Jo-anne Fisher, Ochala Ojonugwa & Pam Winn
School of Nursing, Midwifery & Physiotherapy

Extracts from meetings between student nurses, their professional mentors and an academic, and interviews with the participants, produced as part of a CEPPL funded project on placement learning.
This article was originally published as part of PESL’s Teaching at Nottingham collection. Produced January 2010.

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