Nursing students exchanging knowledge and experience through stories

Team Members: Jessica MacLaren, Maggie Carson, Alison Wood

Abstract

Background: This project explores how sharing stories of their experiences might help nursing students to feel better prepared for the emotional and social demands of clinical placement.  During their 2,300 hours in clinical practice, nursing students must learn and develop as professional nurses. This is hugely demanding for the students, and feedback suggests that they want to feel better prepared for the emotional and social sides of their time in practice.  Over the course of their programme, nursing students also accumulate invaluable experiential knowledge about how to negotiate the role of nursing student, but often have little chance to share this with their more junior colleagues. 

Aims: In a one day story-making workshop, final year nursing students will have the opportunity to reflect on key moments in their development and experiment with different ways of making stories about these. 

Methodology: These stories will be published on a dedicated website, which will be accessible to all undergraduate nursing students.  This will give more junior students who are preparing to go on placement the opportunity to learn from the experiences of their peers.  The stories will also provide a resource for teaching, recruitment and outreach, and be a basis on which to develop future creative methods for helping students to tell the story of their experiences and learn from peers.

Final Project Report

Final Project Report may be downloaded here.