Better Health For All

The Project

Barnet Public Health Team, RCN, and Middlesex University worked together to develop a local authority hosted public health placement specifically for pre-registration nursing.

Nursing Context

It is increasingly important for nurses to understand and recognise their role and contribution to public health. Nurses make up a significant body of professionals working in public health, supporting communities with disease prevention, assessment, education, and evaluation of population health. This move from nursing an individual or small group to the wider community is an opportunity to influence change at a strategic level.

To prepare pre-registration learners for the future workforce a variety of learning experiences in practice including public health is essential. While this has always been implicit within curricula there is a need for more emphasis and direct learning opportunities. The NMC (2018) Standards framework for nursing and midwifery education require all registrants to have an understanding and knowledge of public health agendas and associated health promotion strategies . It is in this context that the pilot project was devised.

First placements

Two child health field student nurses have both completed five weeks placements. With more planned for other field students. The placements were positively evaluated by the students and the public health team.

The students reported

“When out in placement we need to use evidence-based practice to give rationale to the care we are giving to our patients. When the opportunity to spend five weeks of our placement in Public Health we jumped at the chance…

Public Health is all about our community. The decisions made for healthy eating in schools, prevention of diseases through immunisation programmes, flu vaccinations, community centres and support for families, social prescribing, smoking cessation to name just a few…

Listening to the impact that the healthy schools project has had on school children was inspiring. Growing their own vegetables at school AND being able to eat the produce! Healthy lives start with healthy children. Educating from young the importance of a nutritious diet will have positive outcomes for future generations”.

The Learning

The students reported the whole system learning was key to understanding the needs of local families and provided an opportunity to consider more expansive learning regarding the young people who will be in their care:

• Attending foodbanks
• Understanding infection control on a local population level
• Focussing on the health promotion and illness prevention occurring in Barnet
• National initiatives related to the wider social determinants of health.

The Public Health perspective

Having students on placement in public health is a learning opportunity for staff as well as the students. The students bring their recent theoretical learning and the staff can find this interesting and learn too for example discussions about the projects they undertook meant that staff could update themselves on breastfeeding support or staff retention practices in the NHS.

The University perspective

The evident success of this placement as a learning environment for the 2 students so far is exciting. Both considered the transferable skills gained, including enhanced communication, developing a more social model of health and being aware of the public health team roles. This includes the knowledge that public health may be a career choice in the future.

Widening the learning opportunities for the learners is a key objective for the university. With the main campus located in Barnet, the collaborative working with our local authority supports a key university aim to be actively involved in the community.

Benefits for Nurses in Public Health

It can be a challenge for nurses working in public health to meet the NMC revalidation requirements and thus retain registration.

Facilitating student nurse placements is one way of demonstrating how they meet The Code’s requirement to support learners.

This full placement was only possible as there was an NMC registered nurse to undertake the Practice Assessor role within the public health team.

Conclusion

The local authority and HEI were committed to the project and demonstrated the benefits of this collaboration.

This pilot was a success. All involved were able to see the value and reciprocal learning for everyone.

Next steps

• To continue to offer this experience to more nursing students in Barnet.
• To present this experience to public health teams and HEIs in the hope to inspire others to consider this student placement opportunity.
• To develop a toolkit for other localities to support the introduction of this type of placement

Written by Pam Hodge, Middlesex University