A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Nursing and midwifery
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and local placement providers by linking students to ‘Home Trusts’ or ‘Communities of
Practice’ for the majority of their experience. This aims to encourage a sense of belonging
and to increase local recruitment when students complete their programmes. Additional
emphases include interprofessional collaboration, and user and carer involvement.
Nursing and midwifery programmes lead to academic qualifications and registration
with the professional body: that is, they offer a licence to practise. Therefore, it is
particularly important that the assessment of students is reliable and valid (see Chapter
10) and safeguards the public. Widened access to nursing and midwifery education and
the diversity of the student population have increased the need for student support in
relation to personal and academic matters. Much of this support is directed at developing
or reawakening effective approaches to learning and meeting the demands of academic
assessment (see Chapter 9).
Developing technology has affected all aspects of our lives, particularly health. Effective
interventions can now be made where previously none were possible. Interventions can
be quicker, at or near home, and are often less invasive. Expectations are higher and
professionals must learn new skills to exploit new technologies competently and
humanely. In addition, service users and professionals can now access (and need to
evaluate) a wide range of information from the internet (e.g. the National Library for
Health, 2007) or a plethora of telephone and e-mail advice services, including the nurseled
service NHS Direct. Better-informed patients/clients expect to be more involved in
the planning of their care, and students must be prepared for the possibilities and tensions
of this process.
In common with other disciplines, as the knowledge and skills demanded of nurses and
midwives increased, curricula became overcrowded and there is concern about overteaching
students. To address this, some programmes have turned to problem-based
learning (PBL); sometimes termed enquiry-based learning (EBL) (see Chapter 26).
The falling price of technology has helped tutors and students to make greater use of
blended-, mobile- and e-learning (see Chapter 7). These approaches increase flexibility
for learners and can alleviate over-teaching. Flexibility is particularly important within
post-registration provision since healthcare workplaces find it increasingly difficult to
release staff for CPD, raising demand for work-based learning.
KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ATTITUDES
The climate of continual change in healthcare requires an adaptable practitioner,
committed to lifelong learning. Necessary skills include: recognising learning needs and
being able to plan means of addressing these; information seeking, information
management, critique and synthesis. These must be combined with experience in
applying knowledge to professional practice in locally adapted ways. In addition to
engagement with lifelong learning for themselves, students will need to facilitate the
learning of others (peers, junior colleagues, service users): they must prepare to become
educators.