Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Leeds Beckett University celebrates its nursing community on International Nurses Day
We're looking at the role Leeds Beckett is playing in providing nurses of the future and what that future might look like.
The university's School of Health offers a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in nursing. As part of their course, students take part in several placements to help them experience and understand the realities that nursing involves, preparing them for their future workplace.
Alexander Harper studied a nursing degree at LBU before joining the nursing workforce. He has now returned to study to be a Community Specialist Practitioner District Nurse. It was personal experience that led to him choosing nursing: "I've always been interested in nursing since a young age at high school. I had a lot of family members who had long-term conditions, so we were in the hospital environment quite a lot, so from seeing the nurses, the doctors and all the other allied health professionals it prompted me to want to join the profession and become a nurse."
Jenny Haigh is also studying to become a District Nurse. It was a family member who inspired her to be a nurse:
Senior Lecturer Angela Richardson from the School of Health said: "Nursing is a complex profession and is constantly evolving as it reacts to changes in society. We live in a challenging world where these changes affect our nation's health. Nurses are central to supporting people to navigate and improve their health outcomes. It is more important than ever for our profession to be united, embrace new challenges and to work together. It is such a privilege to be a nurse and I feel our student nurses here at LBU work hard and aspire to be hardworking, adaptable, and compassionate nurses of our future."
This year's International Nurses Day is about the future of nursing and Alexander has his mapped out: "My ultimate career goal is to be an advanced nurse practitioner eventually, so this course that I'm doing at the moment is a stepping stone to get there. When I have graduated, I plan to get some experience for a few years as a district nurse, and then following on from that I want to advance my skills forward and come back to Leeds Beckett again to do the Advanced Practitioner course."
Jenny thinks that the role of a nurse is extremely important: "For our patients in the middle of the night and they don't know what to do and they're in pain you're there for them and with the role going the way it is if we could prescribe some drugs and get them to our patients quicker - in that moment we can do so many things for them."
She thinks the future of nursing will be fascinating: "I think it will be evermore specialised. I am hoping that with all the talk at the moment of re-banding that we will be seen for who we are, what we do and that we should be on a par with our other public sector colleagues who are recognised for the degrees that they've got and the responsibilities of the roles that we have. I think the future for nursing is fascinating - who knows where we'll be in the future - there's more technology coming in, there's lots more things that we can do with remote prescribing, remote consultations. I think they need a lot more of us but it's just a bright future and nursing is amazing."
For Alexander, the future will hopefully involve attracting more men to nursing:
