Journal # 7

When you think of undergraduate nursing school there is one word that I can say for sure does not usually come to mind, dissertation. At the City University of London their nursing students before they graduate have to write a 10,000 word dissertation on a problem that they have found in the field. It really surprised me because in the US you usually do not have to write dissertations until you are at a masters or doctorate level. I know that they want their nurses and their nurses’ degrees to be well respected but I never thought that the program would be so rigorous. On the flip side, when we were in the skills lab we talked about IV starts and found out that their student nurses do not start IV’s until they have their RN degree and start taking other classes, that is not considered a normal nursing duty in the UK.


Learning about how the school divides up the time evenly between class and clinical experience and how much time is spent in each area was very interesting. The fact that the student nurses had to choose what they wanted to specialize in before they even made it past their first year, i.e. adult, child , or mental health, to me is such a hard concept because a lot of us are in our final year and don’t even know what we want to do. Another thing that struck me as very different is that the average age of students at their school was mid 30’s whereas at TCU most of us came straight from high school into college to start our degrees. There are a lot of things that are different about nursing school in London as opposed to the United States. One that I think my dad would have liked to have known about before I went into school was that in London they PAY for you to go to school and they PAY you a stipend while you are in school… yes you read that correctly… I would not have had to pay to learn to be a nurse; they would have paid me to learn and paid me for working in the hospitals. Would have been nice right dad?


I have a ton of respect for the nurses in London knowing not only what they have to go through to become nurses, but what they have to deal with once they are. Once they are RN’s they can have anywhere from 7-15 patients that are their patients on a ward on one shift and while their shifts are usually 8 hrs instead of the 12 that ours are that is still a TON of patients! Being a nurse in general is never easy but there are always differences wherever you are that will make it more difficult for you to do your job safely and effectively.


I have a very hard time thinking that it is a safe practice to assign that many patients to one nurse when I know that nurses in the US have less patients than that and there are still medication errors and other errors that occur on shifts. I think that there should be a regulation for how many patients a nurse can have at one given time based on the acuity of the patients. If you stretch a nurse to thin, no matter how well trained they are, mistakes will be made. While I think it is good that they have shorter shifts I think that they need to look at how they are dividing up the work and manage to put more nurses on the floors so that they can keep the patients safe. I know the NHS is tight on money but patient safety should be number one on the list and I feel very strongly that having about 10 patients is not the safest practice.