Just to clarify, I'm not proposing that we change all academic standards for nurse education, only create national standards for the application and interview process, i.e. so that the maths tests are the same whichever university is applied to.
I entirely disagree. Nursing IS an academic subject, and needs to be. First and foremost, every nurse needs to be able to give a rationale for their actions. Not only so they can justify what they are doing in their documentation or to their line manager, but so that if an incident occurs and they are quizzed in court, they can intellectually explain why they did what they did. Secondly, we now have ANPs and the like, many of whom have Masters degrees. High levels of education are needed to carry out their roles, such as prescribing, safely and effectively. Thirdly, the majority of the nurse lecturers we have are probably at least 50. By encouraging our nurses to be academic, we hopefully bring up a new generation of nurses, but also a new generation of academics, into education and research.
Of course, this academic ability shouldn't be chosen above compassion, but then we enter into the debate of care or competency? We need to aspire to both in our student workforce and I don't believe we always do - hence the unsavoury characters you refer to, receiving their PIN (
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HCA work is helpful, but not comprehensive I agree. However, having worked in a role for my university where I engaged with many students interested in nursing, I saw firsthand the misconceptions teenagers have about nursing. Some of them, even at sixth form level and they're thinking of applying to nursing, don't realise the hours we work or that students don't get paid or that we encounter death etc etc. Although I never did any HCA work, I think it's a good indication of whether someone can handle nursing. The only issue is that those who have been HCAs are typically older, and while they bring life experience, they have partners, children, mortgages and other bills to pay which means they are far more likely to drop out. Also, their age doesn't promote longevity of the workforce. If they qualify when they're 45, they can offer us about 15 years work, which isn't a very good return on investment for the NHS who has paid tens of thousands to train them. The universities don't weigh up a student's potential for attrition when accepting people, and this should start to become a factor in deciding who gets offered a place.
For me, I don't think we understand the attrition enough. We need hard data on why people leave. Then we can identify attrition 'risk factors' and then better support students who get on the course, and avoid those who may probably end up dropping out anyway.