Field visit placements: An integrated and community approach to learning in children’s nursing

Creating Meaningful Learning for Children's Nursing Students: Can Museum Field Trips Offer Added Value?

Children's nurses require a wide range of skills and knowledge to enable them to provide the best care for children and families, thus nurse educators must continually strive to ensure they create appropriate and meaningful learning for students in their journey to become children's nurses. Museum visits have been utilized previously within nurse education, but no evidence as to any added value of such visits on the learning of children's nursing students has been reported. This article highlights an innovative teaching strategy that was introduced to a group of year 1 children's nursing students-a field visit to the Museum of Childhood in London-and demonstrates the potential value to their learning. Students worked together in small groups within the museum exploring topics relevant to children's nursing. They had an opportunity to reflect and research further and then worked together to present their learning to their peers. Subsequent evaluation of both the visit and the presentation helped unravel the extent of student learning and highlighted that a range of different learning had taken place. Not without its challenges, the museum visit seemed to provide a meaningful learning experience for students, and suggestions for improving the learning for future similar groups have been explored.

Development of a blended model of teaching and learning for nursing students on rostered placement to ensure competence in information and communication technology for professional practice in Ireland

Experiences gained from delivering a Health Informatics for Nurses course in a school of nursing and midwifery in a university teaching hospital in Ireland suggest that Web-based courses may facilitate an enhanced understanding of course content. Nursing education must recognize the importance of information and communication technology in nursing to prepare the nursing and midwifery profession to embrace current advances in information and communication technology in healthcare in Ireland, and ultimately to benefit patient care.

What are pre-registration nurses taught about caring for children?

Nurse education curricula have to be continually reviewed to ensure that content remains applicable to contemporary healthcare developments. In this article, the authors report the findings of a research study that investigated the children's nursing component taught in all non-children's BSc Nursing degree programmes in Irish colleges. The aim of the study was to identify how European Union directives and national curriculum guidelines are interpreted in colleges, and to clarify the preparation that non-children's pre-registration nursing students receive with respect to caring for children. The authors explored aspects related to children's nursing in all non-children's undergraduate pre-registration programmes, including curriculum content and its delivery, assessments and practice experiences. Data were collected by a specifically designed questionnaire based on the Requirements and Standards for Nurse Education Programmes (An Bord Altranais, 2005a; b). A university ethics committee provided ethical approval. The response rate was 54% (n=7), and data were analysed using SPSS 16 and content analysis. The authors' findings illustrated that the requirements and standards of all nursing programmes are interpreted in a variety of ways regarding children's nursing. Nationally, nursing content related to children needs to be reviewed in all nursing programmes to ensure consistency among providers. Healthcare requirements for children and families need to be heightened within curricula for all disciplines.