Calling out to nurses and student nurses

[Livinglifepeachy]

Hey

I am due to start a nursing degree end of this month but I can't stop feeling like nurses are being taken for a mug and cheap labourers to put it bluntly. Here are the reasons why...

We have to pay over 9k per year in tuition fees and we don't get to choose our placements at the NHS. We don't get paid to be on placement yet apprentices do. Our placement equals to 2700hrs in three years. From what I have heard from second year nurses and third year nurses is that whilst your on placement your mentor usually doesn't have a lot of time for you. We can't actually hold a non flexible jobs because placements can be any day of the week so only when you are not on placement you can achieve to work weekends.

Can someone please share your thoughts on this matter are my feelings justifiable or is there something I have missed?

JustVent, it may not be received well but it doesn't stop a lecturer from saying it.

Our lecturers have made it clear that they can call us in at any point...

We book leave at our own risk.

I qualified in September (not nursing but I did Operating Department Practice) and got a bursary. It worked out at £2.20 an hour. My placement hospital charged us £21 a week to park with no student reduction - staff got discounted rates however!

It was a hard slog and I worked bank on top in the place I used to work - where I have returned to now.

We had 6 weeks off a year but we always had exams right after that time off so it wasn't 'free time'. Was it worth it? Yes it was something I had been meaning to do for years, I'm enjoying the pay jump and the extra responsibilities from being a HCA. I also sometimes miss being a HCA We also were told not to take holidays but I had a few long weekends away during my training. ODP is a good choice for those who are more interested in critical care, theatres, anaesthetics etc.

If lecturers are so sure that all their students will fail their assignments and exams thus having to resit during AL then it must be a horrendously shit university
Thats a leap!
More likely, they cant tell them all that they will all pass!

My placement hospital charged us £21 a week to park with no student reduction - staff got discounted rates however!

The sheer cost of being on placement boils my piss parking is the big one obviously. Some trusts are literally charging students to come and work for free. Even better, every time I change trusts, I have to pay full whack to park up to collect the parking pass I've already paid for.

stargazer I believe you! If the time for make-up hours for placement sickness and resits, deferred submissions etc is in the summer holidays, then it makes sense.

And in any cohort people will have extensions and sickness and bereavements and all sorts of other issues that have nothing to do with poor teaching.

You said that your daughter has a long commute to placements so it sounds like she's probably quite far from places that have staff banks too? That also sounds plausable. And if her live-in friends are doing as many non contact learning hours as theyre supposed to then I can see why they might struggle to fit in work too!

Nurse banks are not always taking on student nurses. And there can be a long wait to get signed on too.

I need to get my driving licence before I get onto placement. If I don't I will be taking public transport and I am not looking forward to Sunday slow bus days

Fruitcider there are so many placements and so many different settings you say it's selected to make you an all rounder but I can 100% name you more 8 different departments where nurses work! So if I have a genuine interest in icu or a and e why is it wrong to be allowed to go and do a placement there especially if I have paid 9k? Oh wait it's because all students are allocated based on luck of the draw and whatever the NHS means.
I think you need to reread my posts because I am not looking at it as a chore. It's common sense when you go to a shop and buy crunchy nut you don't expect coco pops to pop out. So why is it bad to want to choose something your interested in learning?

You are buying an adult nursing degree, and you are getting an adult nursing degree. Likewise it's not a tuck shop - you don't get to pick and choose the bits you want. Placement circuits are complex in ways that you will not even comprehend yet because you have not enrolled yet. You probably don't understand why having a mix of placements is important.

Yes it's shit that you don't get a bursary, however that and the flaws of the programme are 2 separate things.

And yes the degree is hard, but it's perfectly possible to work alongside. Getting on the bank is incredibly easy once you have done 1 or 2 placements.

Good luck

I did nursing at uni. I quit nursing. Its really a hard, physical job and some patients and relatives are abusive. Lots of emotional labour

I wouldn’t pay 30k to do nursing now that’s for sure!

It’s criminal there aren’t any bursaries for nursing given the retention crisis - should be decent bursaries that have to be repaid on a sliding scale if you leave the NHS after 3 to 5 years or something.

I'm halfway through my 2nd year and I would say I'm 50/50 about my placement experiences so far. I had an awful mentor in my 1st year, who ignored me whenever I was on shift with her. So I aligned myself to other nurses that wanted to support my learning and willing to sign off my competences. When I qualify I will never treat my mentees the way she treated me.

If I was paying £20k per year and this was my first degree experience, I would have walked away by now. Student nurses are not getting value for money academically or on placement. That's just my opinion when I compare my experience to my first degree.

My first degree was a walk in the park in comparison to this. Being a student nurse is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Juggling a part-time job and placement is tough, but I've only got 18months left and it will fly by.

A lot of people in my cohort and the year behind me are very very unhappy but they're sticking it out because they can see the end game. I'm hoping to develop my career initially in critical care, moving into research or service improvement.

Have a look for the student nurses support groups on Facebook. You'll get a wider spread of responses from student nurses at different stages of their training and newly qualified nurses. You can literally post any nursing related question and somebody will reply. Good luck

I'm a 2nd year student nurse (adult) and I absolutely would not want to do anything else. I started my journey 16 years ago and have been band 2, band 3, band 4 and in 18ish months time will be a band 5.

I'm in a very enviable position, I went directly into 2nd year (so only started 6 months ago) and am being sponsored by my trust. It's not a secondment, I'm not getting my full band 4 wage, I've actually 'lost' £9000pa and I have to pay my tuition fees. I also don't get my travel reimbursed nor do I get my parking reimbursed like my fellow students BUT I know how lucky I am and will never complain. What I have lost in wages I have made up in pride.

OP it doesn't sound like you are committed to the course at all. You haven't even started yet and you already sound miserable at the prospect.

As for holidays, I get 2 weeks at Christmas, 2 weeks at Easter and 4 weeks in summer....and yes, we have been told we aren't to book any holidays in that time. As I can't afford a holiday anyway I'm not overly annoyed

I've been nursing for 31 years this year, it's physically and emotionally challenging but it's the most rewarding and privileged job, I never want to do anything else. Good luck with your training, it will be worth it.

I booked a sun950 holiday . I'm really excited about going to a caravan to chill with a pile of text books. I finish one placement and a massive exam.

Then I will head to holiday and while my husband and toddler will be at disco and out playing. I will be studying so I can hit the next placement running.

It will be my last placement of second year and if I don't make an impression, I won't be signed off to enter 3rd year in September.

Oh and the person who said that sometimes people did a course because the bursary was paid is absolutely right - obviously not all of them - but there are people who are very open about this

I believe you may have gotten the wrong end of the stick here. Many mature students, myself included, are able to do the degree because of the bursary

I haven't got the wrong end of the stick. I'm a lecturer in healthcare and I can tell you that there were always students on each cohort who wanted to do a funded degree, regardless of what that degree was. Some of them go on to do the job, others do not - they are really very open within their peer group and also sometimes (unwisely) with mentors and practice educators.

This government think that the way to increase the numbers of nurses on the front line is to remove the cap on training by doing away with commissioned places - of course, any idiot can tell you that this is completely the wrong approach, but sadly it seems like whoever makes these decisions has no brain cells at all.

Some of our fantastic HCP are mature students, the government has made it almost impossible for most of those people to train now. Sad days for our patients and service users who will miss out on such dedicated and gifted staff.

Apologies for an incredibly ignorant post. I'm from and live in Scotland (not a nurse) so whilst I was aware of the £9k tuition fees per annum students outside of scotland pay, I genuinely didn't think this applied to nurses. I don't know why I thought this and apologies again but this thread has opened my eyes. Thank you to all the nurses and other health care professionals.

The tuition fees used to be paid by the NHS buddha however, when they did away with the bursary they also did away with that. There are many, many people who do not realise this as the government kept it very quiet.

I'm a lecturer in healthcare and I can tell you that there were always students on each cohort who wanted to do a funded degree

Wanting to do a funded degree is extremely unlikely to be their sole reason for studying nursing. Lecturer or not, I'm afraid you're failing to see the complexity both of the mature students you're making statements about and of what drives us as people.

The following is not the thought process.

Want to change career/start working.
Decide to do a degree. Any degree.
What degree can I do for free?
How about a gruelling nursing degree that'll leave me with no social life, possibly unable to work while I'm doing it, will see me working for half the year at far less than minimum wage, and end up on a bit of a meagre wage for a career that requires a degree?

The bursary doesn't make it an all singing all dancing attractive option to those who don't want it.

It simply made it an option for those of us who do.

I think you've go the wrong end of the stick I'm not talking about mature students specifically, in fact the people I know who have chosen healthcare as a funded degree are younger (although perhaps technically mature students).

The mature students have usually had to work harder to get to the point of being accepted and as such are more focussed, which is often a characteristic of more mature learners anyway.

For the record, I think that removing the bursary is a terrible thing for healthcare in the UK, but not surprising given this governments thinly veiled attempts to undermine it.

Exactly what I thought when I read that Shapley....

I'm not sure why you think any of my posts relate to mature students

It doesn't actually sound like you know who you're talking about daily. Not that it matters. Regardless of whether you mean mature students or not, wanting to do any degree at all if it can be done for free doesn't translate to having the grit, determination and passion that is absolutely fundamental in making it through a nursing degree. Because if there's no other motivation at all, it's also free to quit.

I totally agree that to make the most of any HCP training course, those skills and qualities are needed, however some people go through and do the bare minimum in order to get the qualification. They are in the minority, but they exist.

All credit to you, that you are clearly so passionate and committed that you can't understand how other people might not be but the sad reality (based on first hand experience) is that they exist. It's incredibly frustrating for all the people who invest so much of themselves in a profession which means so much to them.

I'm obviously not being very clear, because I know exactly who I'm talking about, they just don't fit into a neat box. You seem to have made an assumption that I'm talking about a specific group of students (i.e. mature), when nothing could be further from the truth - in fact I never even mentioned mature students other than to correct your assumption).

Anyway, there is clearly no point in continuing this discussion, you clearly have a view on a situation, based on your own (commendable) values and seem to struggle to understand how this might not be transferable to everyone.

You cant do "the bare minimum" in a nursing degree. You can in an academic degree. Its not simply a case of scraping a pass, they also have to demonstrate fitness to practice throughout and then theres the shify work placements..theyre not optional

For example nursing students cant have half arsed attendance, they wont go through to yr 2, or even onto placement no2.

We had a few in our intake whose hearts werent in it. They were out by Christmas of year 1!