Get into UK Nursing School For Dummies

Andrew Evered

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118560358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Habilidades de enfermería

The need for nurses is always great, but so is the competition to secure a place in a pre-registration programme at university. If you're considering a career in nursing, Get into UK Nursing School For Dummies can provide you with the vital edge you need to succeed at getting into nursing school. This compact book provides you with expert advice at each step along the way, including:

• Career assessment — is nursing for you?
• Choosing a field to specialize in — adult, children's, mental health or learning disability nursing.
• Long term planning — A-levels, extracurricular activities, volunteer work, and work experience — that can make you a more attractive candidate
• Considerations for mature/non-traditional students.
• Personal statement — Plenty of insight and examples to help you create a winning and — truly personal — personal statement
• Research — Put together a plan that ensures you find a university that's right for you.
• Test preparation — Brush up on your literacy and numeracy skills.
• The interview — Common questions and how to tackle them whether you're in a one-on-one and group interview.

From "How do I get started?" to "When can I expect to be offered a place?" Get into Nursing School For Dummies answers the questions you have with the information you need.

Part I

Getting Started with a Career in Nursing

Go to www.dummies.com/extras/getintonursingschooluk for free online bonus content created especially for this book.

In this part . . .

Delve into the history of nursing.

Understand the four different types of nursing: adult, child, mental health and learning disabilities.

Find out about the Nursing and Midwifery Council.

Get familiar with the different places nurses work – from the NHS to the armed forces.

Chapter 1

Getting to Know Nursing

In This Chapter

Finding out what nursing is

Understanding what a nurse does

Looking at career opportunities

Seeing how you can become a nurse

Welcome to nursing! In this chapter I familiarise you with the nursing profession, delve into a little history and explain the wide-ranging roles nurses carry out. I explain exactly how you train to become a nurse. I also introduce you to the Nursing and Midwifery Council, which crops up frequently throughout this book, the National Health Service and the Royal College of Nursing.

Read on too, to discover how you can travel the world with your valuable nursing skills . . .

Defining the Nursing Profession

What is nursing? Although this looks like a straightforward question, very few candidates can actually answer it well.

The admission tutors expect you to have formed some opinion of what nursing is and how it differs from other healthcare practices. Defining nursing can be difficult because one of its strengths is that it draws together knowledge from many other disciplines, such as the social and biological sciences. The essence of nursing practice is how it utilises a wide range of sources and a mixture of knowledge to create an entirely individual and distinct profession.

Here’s an illustration of what nursing is, based upon the Royal College of Nursing’s definition:

Nursing is [. . .] the use of clinical judgement in the provision of care to enable people to improve, maintain, or recover health, to cope with health problems, and to achieve the best possible quality of life, whatever their disease or disability, until death.

These are the characteristics that support this definition:

Purpose. Nurses promote health and wellbeing, minimise suffering and encourage patient understanding. When death is inevitable, nurses offer best-quality care during the end of life.

Intervention. Nurses encourage patient empowerment and independence by using a unique process to identify nursing needs and offer direct nursing care.

Domain. Nurses understand how people respond to health and illness, both in the physical and psychological sense but also in social, cultural and spiritual terms too.

Focus. Nurses focus on patients as a whole and care for all human responses rather than caring for particular conditions or illnesses.

Values. Nursing is based upon a set of ethical values that respect dignity, autonomy, individuality and the nurse–patient relationship. Nurses accept professional accountability.

Partnership. Nurses commit to working in partnership with patients, relatives, carers and the multidisciplinary team.

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A brief history of nursing

Nursing has been with us through the ages. It may not have been called nursing centuries ago, and it has been associated with wise old women, tribal leaders and even witchcraft at some points in history. However, there have always been individuals ready to come to the aid of others when they are unwell or in distress, and it was often, but not exclusively, women who took on this role of caring.

Nursing is seen as a social construct, responding to current events of the time. Sometimes nursing was the domain of the religious, while in other times it was delegated to the more lowly characters in society. Slowly, nursing became more organised, and although there was little formal education, it was influenced by religious, military and hierarchical structures – which is why nurses have titles such as ‘matron’, ‘sister’ and ‘staff’.

Prior to the 19th century the portrayal of nursing was one of lower-class women who undertook rather remedial roles in the support of the medical profession, often with little or no training. But modern nursing is, of course, very different (although some modern nurses d...