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Standing on the outside
Rethinking the future of nursing education .
Tracey Moroney interviewed by Eleanor Campbell
Student nurses and midwives will be critical to assisting Australia ’ s recovery from COVID-19 , but have gone largely unrecognised by the broader system , according to education leaders .
Tracey Moroney , a professor of Nursing at the University of Wollongong , says there needs to be a shift in thinking about the value students and graduates add to the system .
“ I ’ ve noticed that students are often excluded from the work hospitals at the moment ,” Moroney told Campus Review .
“ Students are really being treated as outsiders of the healthcare team rather than integral members .”
To prepare student nurses for an uncertain future , Moroney says , educators should encourage critical dialogue and focus on building resilience .
Maroney joined Campus Review to chat about rethinking the role of student nurses , enabling resilience through learning , and her future hopes for the next generation in healthcare .
CR : What are some of the greatest challenges you ’ ve seen the pandemic bring for our student nurses ? TM : The first one is the on-campus experiential learning that programs of
nursing rely so heavily on : being able to work with students in simulated laboratories to develop the skills and knowledge needed for safe practice . I ’ ve seen lots of creativity around the country as people have tried to address how to engage students in simulated learning that ’ s going to help them to develop the skills needed for safe practise .
The second one is about clinical placements . I think this has been a really tricky space for us all over the last two years . Sitting on the sidelines , I ’ ve noticed that students are often excluded from the work of hospitals at the moment , and this is often because hospitals are in crisis themselves , as they ’ re trying to deal with the pandemic and just the uncertainty of how to care for patients during this really stressful time for everybody .
We know that hospitals and other clinical environments have been really busy , but students seem to have been lost in the discussion . One of the things that I have started to talk about is that students are really being treated as outsiders , rather than integral members of the healthcare team .
My colleagues and I at the Council of Deans of Nursing and Midwifery have been trying to push that students add value to healthcare systems – that they contribute towards and offer assistance with patient care . They listen to patients . They provide help to the busy registered nurse who ’ s actually working so diligently through their daily shift . But the problem is , students have been largely forgotten from this , and so we haven ’ t integrated the student into the healthcare team , and I think that this has actually been a real problem for us .
Do you think that the pandemic has brought any potential opportunities for students and nurses ? We ’ ve really had to look at our programs and ask : what are the elements of teaching that can be safely taught in an online space ? Kudos to academics who have really , I think , demonstrated a lot of resilience during this time as they ’ ve pivoted from an on-campus experience to an online experience .
I know at the University of Wollongong , where I work , that the academics there have been so responsive to thinking about the essence of teaching and learning and what needs to be delivered in terms of safe outcomes for patients . We ’ ve really worked through a lot of what needs to occur so that students can continue to learn on their journey to becoming an exceptional registered nurse .
The second thing is that we ’ ve really had to think creatively about simulation learning . In the work I do lots of things come up all the time about the nursing lab and the resources that sit inside that lab . But for a lot of this year , we ’ ve not had students on campus , so we haven ’ t actually been able to use the nursing lab , and that ’ s taken some thoughts about how we can actually adapt experiential learning in an online space , and what we can do to assist that .
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