Late winter sunshine - an academic's break

I am just preparing for my last-gasp 'summer' break - Kefalonia to set me up for the winter. I love  late summer sun and sea leaving me energised. I've got a few things to think about while I am away:
- my birthday resolution which is to read all the Booker prize winners (Margaret Atwood and AS Byatt are packed);
- the article I am writing with an Australian colleague - developing a theoretical stance on partnership working which we are going to test out collaboratively with my local Director of Nursing;
- the final part of my Florence Nightingale Foundation/Burdett Trust scholarship - bringing the learning together. If anyone out there is looking for any leadership development, you might want to consider FNF - an amazing experience for me personally and for the good friends that I have made over the year.
- my imminent (November) Malawi trip - anyone out there with experience of Malawi or of developing/evaluating educational and mentorship initiatives in developing countries..... please get in touch!
- the final report for my NHS Education for Scotland funded project on the selection of students.

I am looking forward to the clear blue skies, the sea and the mountains, and the time for thinking and relaxing. I know that I will come back ready for the new academic session. Exciting times! (Mind you, I'm not sure that even the Greek Islands can get much more beautiful than a sunset in Stonehaven with friends).

Missing NET2012.... And Tweeting

It's that time of year again - NET 2012 in Cambridge (and incidentally my birthday! - reminds me of when I went to school in England and I always went back after the summer holidays on or around my birthday...). I have a paper for presentation at the conference on the work of the NES Recruitment and Retention Delivery Group which Mike Sabin is presenting on our behalf. We think it will be of interest nationally (and more widely), particularly in relation to the work we have done on data enhancement and ongoing work on selection of students. There seems to be an appetite nationally to invest our energies in understanding values-based selection, and the Delivery Group is collaborating nationally on this area.

I am sorry to be missing NET for a number of reasons - it's always good to present one's ideas/research in a supportively challenging environment, along with the genuine opportunities to make meaningful connections with like-minded colleagues. As well as those important reasons, I love Cambridge where I did my own training.

On to Tweeting - As well as being quite new to blogging, I have taken to Twitter (@ruthft1). As an introvert (see previous postings), I am getting into Twitter in the same way that I do with relationships - slowly but surely. I have found it to be a fantastic resource for policy developments and wider debate as well as the creation of connections with people that I might not otherwise have been in contact with. If you're interested in 140 character discussion, I'd be delighted to see you following me so that we can 'talk' on subjects of interest. In the meantime, I will be keeping my eye on Twitter for the chat that will be coming from NET2012, and will look forward to catching up with my colleagues when they get back.

Other people's views - working with patients who are 'different' from ourselves

George Galloway finally seems to have lost the plot in his recent statements regarding rape. This blog post is not really about what he has to say, except to say that I am personally outraged by what he (and similar others) have been saying. It is hurtful and offensive. These feelings set me thinking about what happens when we work with patients who hold different views from ourselves - on issues that are fundamental to the way we see the world. How do we work with our student nurses to enable them to deal with the tension that can sometimes exist when we have to hear and experience the views of others that sit uncomfortably with our own world views? For me this issue relates to the focus on caring and compassion that I have had running through many of my postings. My perspective is that it is possible to offer compassionate care even in circumstances that are personally challenging. The education of nurses involves the development of self-awareness, interpersonal skills, awareness of others and their needs, and a real focus on person-centredness. Delivering compassionate care can be learned in my opinion - I think that as long as the nurse has the fundamental characteristics required for compassionate care, the skills required for the enactment of that compassion can be learned. We need to help our students understand that patients have many views, characteristics and values - and each person is a complex mix. So, even though I cannot bear the thought of George Galloway today, I know that I could deliver compassionate care to him if I needed to.

Willis Commission - impact for education

A brief blog as I am just back from Nice and settling back into a different mode of being..... Was interested and very encouraged to see that degree nurses are not 'too posh to wash'. In other words, enhancing the education of nursing students does not appear to compromise their ability to be compassionate. It's my usual soapbox but I (and many of my colleagues who I discuss this with) know this. However, it is great that these early findings seem to bear out what many of us have been saying - that we need to ensure that our nursing workforce are highly educated. Of course, we must all place an emphasis on person-centred compassionate care as we work with our students in the university and in practice.

Understanding others

I have just finished reading The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (which won the Man Booker prize in 2011). It's a bit tenuous to link my leisure reading into a professional blog but I thought I would give it a try anyway! It is a short book - a novella that took me a few hours to read - but (uncommonly for me) I went straight back to page 1 on completing it. I found it impacted on me in a way that doesn't often happen by compellingly taking me into one person's story. For those who haven't read the book, it is a story told by a man looking back over his life, acknowledging the tricks that memory can play, but emphasising the impact that one's experiences can have (whether correctly remembered or not) on choices that are then played out over a lifetime. For me, the feeling that the book has left me with is a renewed appreciation of the complexities of seemingly straightforward lives, the hidden depths of people's experiences that may not be obvious to the casual bystander (or the health professional), and the assumptions that we can make about people's motivations and choices in life. We obviously can't do in-depth interviews with our patients to uncover their life experiences, but for me the book highlighted that we need to take time to understand people as best as we can so that we can at least attempt to put ourselves in the shoes of others when caring for them - an impossible task I know. I don't often get to my leisure reading these days, but I must do so more often as good books help me to appreciate and understand people and ideas better.

"What can and should be done about nursing?"

Articles in the Independent newspaper draw attention to the widespread views of the public and some in the nursing profession of the concerns regarding the standards of care. The general view of the author seems to be that things have gone wrong, and that the way in which we educate nursing students plays a large part in the 'glaring deficiencies' in some practice areas. To balance the negativity the author does highlight that there are 'many excellent nurses and many inspirational examples'.

While I am in complete agreement that we must always evaluate practice and offer the highest standards of care, I continue to find it disappointing that so much of the rhetoric surrounding the evident problems is focused on a supposed change in compassion and empathy (in simplistic terms, nurses used to have compassion and empathy, but now they don't). Interesting that one person who was interviewed for one of the pieces suggests that nursing is a 'basic instinct' in some people, and not rocket science. What I have noticed about myself as a nurse, and my students, is that the educational process facilitates the development of core skills and knowledge for practice, and also enables us to develop as people within the professional context. The combination of high-level knowledge and skills required for nursing practice within this current context alongside compassion, caring, empathy, convinces me that university education (properly developed, implemented and evaluated for practice) is the only way that we can drive up standards. When I say 'university education', I am referring to the essential collaborative approach for education - with students, patients, carers, others. Ever the optimist, I remain convinced that most of the people who choose to come into nursing do so for the best reasons, and that we as educators have the tools to facilitate the development of their potential.

Once again I was privileged to sit on the graduation stage yesterday which our students walked across with pride. My own personal tutor group were amongst those completing and I can honestly say that I would have no hesitation in leaving the care of any of my family or friends in their hands. These intelligent, caring, thoughtful and well-developed individuals are a credit to the profession. It is my hope that people like these continue to work hard to impact positively on practice and to help to make the changes where these are required.

Professionalism in nursing

The Nursing and Midwifery Council has been in the headlines this morning with news of its failings. As registrants we have been aware of the issues facing the NMC for some time now, but the news puts the story firmly in the public spotlight. It will be interesting to see how the NMC shapes up as they make changes and interesting to see that already they have withdrawn the NMC professional advice service so as to avoid confusion relating to their role as regulator. From my perspective, it is not good news for the professions to see the NMC in this situation. It is likely that this story will add fuel to the media fire about standards of care with assumptions potentially being made about the state of nursing itself.

I am sure we all want to see nursing's profile raised positively and as educators (in universities and in practice) we work hard with students to provide them with the learning opportunities that will enable them to operate as professional, caring, compassionate and intelligent nurses. As I've said before on my blog, I am really interested in working towards a situation where we are able to select students who have the potential for all these qualities - I am doing a funded project on a related area. I don't want to give the impression that we haven't been selecting the right people - we have in most cases I think. But there is a need for us to hone our decision-making so that we ensure that we continue to drive up standards of care across all the settings in which we operate.