Student nurses at London unis. Help and advice :)

Im currently a student at kings in my 2nd year of a politics degree, and i'm applying to do adult nursing to for 2012 entry, i will be 23 when i start. I think London is great you will love it, and all the unis that u r applying to will have a great atmosphere. London is expensive, if you want to save money and u r a mature student you should look for a room to rent rather than halls, because halls are much more expensive than getting a room somewhere in zone 2, zone1 of london is stupidly expensive. You can look for other students to share a flat etc, but if u want the whole student 'life' thing then do hall for a year, although i didn't live at halls i still made lots of friends and did all the society stuff, you just have to make the effort. Food and that is cheap if you shop at the big supermarkets of you bother to find your local markets, there is also lots of offers for students with your NUS card.

'cutting edge' Healthcare developments are not confined to London ...

another question to consider is how much benefit to your clinical practice as a Registered Nurse do you derive from working in an clinical environment where the 'Cutting Edge' of Medicine is practiced with the associated hot and cold running registrars, super super specialisation etc. this brings ?

I still have to have the same clinical and academic skills as every other student nurse in the country, so no I dont think I would suffer.
Also considering I want to go into clinical research, I think this would be a benefit to me.
Yes there are other places like Newcastle and Liverpool that have cutting edge clinical research going on but per a square mile there is way more in London.
I was by no means saying that if you didnt go to London you didnt go to a good uni Im just stating one of the reasons I want to go to London is because of the research. Everyone has different reason and different goals I dont see what is wrong with mine and why you had to be so negative about it.

point missed or what ?

what benefit to your clinical practice as a REGISTERED NURSE do you get from being somewhere where there is lots of 'cutting edge' medicine being practiced ...

a decent DGH will give a Student Nurse are far better and rounded clinical experience without the supersubspecialistion seen in the places with 'cutting edge ' medical research going on...

it's all well and good getting ( as an example) your Orthopaedic nursing experience on a 'cutting edge ' medical research unit but unless you only ever want to care for ortho patients who have had robotic surgery to their left big toe ...

in a large teaching hospital with it;s hot and cold running doctors you'll find that Nursing practice is often limited by the fact that management see no need for Nurses to develop their practice because there is hot and cold running registrars ...

To be honest I am not getting your point because there are hundreds or very well qualified nurses that come out of London unis. The fact that I want to be there to see some more advanced stuff is is my personal preference. Also do you think that every placement a student nurse at London uni goes on is doing cutting edge research because I dont, some placement are in just general wards were student practice skills.


Also I think your forgetting that the research I am talking about could one day be used by nurses. Heck some of the research is carried out by nurses

when did I mention pre-reg.

I honestly dont know what you are getting at.
I dont think that I wont need good clinical skills, so Im not sure where you got that idea???

I think your maybe just trying to start a debate. Even when it was not the point of this thread and my reasons for studying in London are valid.

I would like to do research in the future, going to a London school may allow me a better chance to see what that involves so upon graduation I can make a more informed decision about what direction to focus my career. I know I can get this opportunity in other cities but there are a lot more hospital in London doing it.

Just out of interest, do you work in a London hospital or did you/are you training there?

the second point is good clinical skills make or Break the RN , not what HEI they attended or which hospitals they had placements in ... if you aren't careful you'll end up like young Davey as just another victim of Premature burn out

I prefer to think of myself as simply being a realist.

You all keep referring to the 'clinical skills' whatever the **** that means. As if graduating nurses have this massive list of clinical skills outside of drug administration (and not IV at that).

Clinical knowledge is useful, but nursing has failed to professionalise, in that it has failed to generate a single body of knowledge that it can lay claim to. Clinical knowledge is the linchpin to clinical skills, you can train a monkey to do most clinical skills as isolated tasks.

You may think I am jaded, but if this were not the case, why can RNs be replaced in most circumstances by technicians and minimally qualified assistants?

There is no expectation of nurses to know jack **** about anything, because we collectively carry very little autonomy in these 'clinical skills', or do we see wiping bottoms as a clinical skill worthy of a skilled wage? maybe that is why we are being replaced? Drug administration seems to be the last barrier of the HCA/assistant/CSW, and they will break that down soon enough.

For example, a qualifying nurse may consider doing an ecg a clinical skill, but actually there is a diagram on the machine that tells you where to stick the dots and which wire goes where, its difficult to **** up. Now reading an ECG relies on clinical knowledge worthy of a skilled wage, but nursings failure to professionalise has led to the "I haven't been on the right day course to do that " approach to clinical knowledge.

Nursings days in its current guise are numbered, we are an expensive luxury. We will become less in numbers in terms of staff who provide care and it is up to the next generation of nurses as to whether we become supervisors of care or drug administering monkeys. Its nothing to do with burnout, its simply the truth. Whatever you think of yourself and your own skill set, go to your hospitals MAU and have a chat with the nurses there about a patients clinical condition, that is your average staff nurse and it genuinely bothers me that they are on the same pay scale as me for knowing nothing about everything. I would go as far as to say that if you deny there is a problem in nursing, you are part of the problem in nursing.

in a specialist hospital or big city teaching hospital , you are far more likely to have specialised junior and middle grade medical rotas, the staff will be socialised into not acting without consulting the Doctor , were as in other Acute hospitals you will be expected to take a much more proactive approach to managing your patients and seeking the advice and support of the on call medical staff when your skills or authorisations are not sufficient to undertake the next stage of the plan ...

You are not understanding what I am saying. I am completely aware that I will need good clinical skill and I know that the DGH will be the better place to practice them and I never said other wise yet for some reason you keep going on about the attitude/roles of junior doctors.
I can understand what you are saying but it has nothing to do with what I was saying because once again you did not read my post.

this is 2011 not 1911 , no one is going to go 'zOMG Anon2010 trained in London , therefore she must be a brilliant Nurse' as might have been the case 100 years ago when ,
When did I say training in London would make me a better nurse? I said I would like to see some of the stuff going on in the hospitals down there so I could decide on my future, I am under no impression that it will make me better or that I will be more employable, that will come off my own back and be a result of my own hard work.
Again read post before you reply instead of just guessing what I said.

One of the points is what research are you actually interested in Medical research or Nursing research , and as for 'more opportunities' in a London Hospital i'd suspect that you'll find that the promise is not met with reality Nurses are part of a lot of medical research too, so what is you point?


the second point is good clinical skills make or Break the RN , not what HEI they attended or which hospitals they had placements in ... if you aren't careful you'll end up like young Davey as just another victim of Premature burn out
Again (you really have to start learning to read, because its getting annoying now) I did NOT say anything about "being at such and such uni would make me a better nurse/more employable" I also never said "I think the placements in London hospital will get me a job"


Basically you are just making up your own argument.

be careful to focus not solely on interventions , procedures or tasks there young padawan ...

'define' massive list Davey or are you forgetting important skills and knowledge which is primarily in the Nursing domain, especially around tissue viability and wound care ... even plastic surgeons will tell you that wound care is black magic fully understood only by Nurses ...

it's very easy to get over focused on certain skills or on the corporate culture in one trust or even on one site within a trust about doing or not doing things


This is where if you aren't careful working in specialist big city hospitals can add to the deprofessionalisation of Nurses, especially if there are recruitment and retention problems ( As occurs when people can't afford to live in sensible public transport / foot commuting distance and you charge 12 pound a Day to park rather than the next trust along charging 12 pounds a month ) and as others have suggested before it's possible to get into first line management with 2-3 years post reg experience.

a Trust local to Davey and I tried this and then wondered why in the hardest hit area one of mr Tony Bliar's crowd pleasing targets took a 5 -7 % hit and turned that unit from one of the highest performing units in the region to one of the poorest ...

this is a symptom of working in a big city teaching hospital - there is no incentive to maintain and develop a skilled nursing workforce as this costs money - especially if you retain staff to the top of the pay scale , where the deanery will fund loads of junior doctors if the medicla schools tell them to and oh yes the trust and the medicla school are so intertwined becasue the Uni appointment Hon consultants bring in the big money research and tertiary work ...

Davey you've got burn out and you've got it bad ... make the break, change speciality, change employer or gtfo of Nursing before you kill yourself or a patient

I found this an interesting read

Yea same here.