Exploring placement pathways in nurse education.

As community-based care has developed in line with current policy towards integrated care, some hospital placement capacity for student health professionals has been lost as a result of service reorganisation. However, student nurses and allied health professionals need to gain a broad range of experience to prepare them for the complex and rapidly changing environments they will be entering as qualified professionals. Placement pathways constitute a means of offering the knowledge and skills to enter the profession in challenging times.

Community engagement: from a professional to a public perspective.

Community engagement is a policy initiative to promote public health, and represents government aspirations to develop a healthy and fair society. It is a recent addition to a succession of policy initiatives that are designed to encourage members of the public to become more engaged in the promotion and maintenance of their optimum health. While earlier policies focused on individual behaviour, community engagement considers the actions that communities can take to promote health.

'A Juggling Act': an analysis of the impact of providing clinical placements for pre-registration students on the organisation of community nursing and health visiting work.

Modernising policies for the NHS have aimed to strengthen the nursing workforce through enhancing professional roles and increasing the numbers of pre-registration students. The current emphasis upon community based health care has led to an increase in the quantity and complexity of the workload for community nurses and health visitors, whilst at the same time educational developments have led to additional responsibilities supporting nursing students on community placements. These issues are explored in this paper which reports findings from a qualitative study in a large city based Primary Care Trust (PCT).

Two levels of practice: meeting professional or workforce needs.

The introduction of Project 2000 raised the stature of nursing education to that of the university-based training for other healthcare professionals. Historically, nursing workforce needs have been satisfied by the manipulation of the requirements to enter training, different levels of training and by the recruitment of trained nurses from abroad. This article examines issues regarding the level of training and education required to enable nurses to be fit for practice.