'Waterside General': University of Northampton place students at 'pop up hospital' on campus

The pandemic’s squeeze on one aspect of nursing students’ education has been resolved at the University of Northampton (UON) with a pop-up ‘hospital’ at Waterside campus.

As part of their degrees, nursing students must complete a set number of hours on clinical placement in settings such as hospitals, inpatient units and community settings, alongside registered nurses.

As with other universities across England at this point in time, most teaching and learning is being provided online. A small number of hours for face-to-face teaching are set for specific courses on a Government list.

Nursing is one of those courses, but with Covid restrictions in place across the health service, the number of hours available for clinical placements has been reduced across all fields of nursing.

This heralded a ‘lightbulb moment’ for UON’s Nursing lecturers about how to ensure students from their 2019 year get as much clinical experience as possible.

With Waterside teaching rooms for Nursing and Occupational Therapy mostly unoccupied, the team have created bespoke inpatient and community settings right in the centre of campus.

The students undertake an eight hour nursing shift each Saturday, starting at 9:15 in the morning. They work their way around a number of simulated scenarios that resemble – as close to real-life as possible – actual, nursing experiences.

The roles of each patient are played by other nursing students or life-cast models. They are supervised and assessed by qualified nurses from UON’s lecturing staff:

In the acute hospital adult setting they meet Michael who has a fracture neck of femur and Emily who has diabetes and a lower leg wound.

At the learning disability (LD) inpatient unit they meet Natalie who has an LD and is cared for alongside other patients.

The mental health (MH) inpatient unit assesses students' MH knowledge and skills with Sarah who has suicidal thoughts and is depressed.

In the children’s and young people’s ward, students work with child life-cast models including Roscoe, who has abdominal pain and also meet his parents.

In the community setting they meet Stan, Baby Zac and Peter, all with different medical problems that need assessing.