CitySCaPE: Moving beyond indifference in education for pre-registration nurses about learning disability.

People with learning disabilities and Autism continue to suffer from the delivery of ineffective and inadequate care from health services CitySCaPE (City Simulated Community and Practice Environment) is a multi media resource delivering a simulation of situations student nurses may encounter in relation to service users with learning disabilities. The resource is applicable to adult, mental health and children's nursing. It is delivered in a blended approach to students in the first part of their programme as part of their simulated practice.

Immersive simulated reality scenarios for enhancing students' experience of people with learning disabilities across all fields of nurse education.

Poor preparation of nurses, regarding learning disabilities can have devastating consequences. High-profile reports and the Nursing and Midwifery Council requirements led this University to introduce Shareville into the undergraduate and postgraduate nursing curriculum. Shareville is a virtual environment developed at Birmingham City University, in which student nurses learn from realistic, problem-based scenarios featuring people with learning disabilities.

Developing an e-learning resource in clinical risk assessment.

This article describes a project in which computer-centred technology was used to deliver clinical risk assessment training to staff in a specialist addictions unit. The difficulty in releasing staff from already stretched services led to the development of an in-house e-learning tool designed to bridge the gap between standardised risk assessment training and the requirements of staff who work in addictions services. The e-learning tool was developed on a small budget and is fairly rudimentary, but has been well received by staff, although they do not regard it as a replacement for classroom-based teaching.

An audit of interventions for dual diagnosis in a psychiatric unit.

A programme of training on dual diagnosis was implemented for mental health nurses working in an acute psychiatric unit following recommendations at both a national and local level. An audit of the key standards was carried out to examine the interventions offered to patients with a dual diagnosis. An improvement was observed in the standards of care, but the sample size was small and without further statistical analysis it would be difficult to determine whether the improvement is statistically significant.