I am at the kitchen table surrounded by books and articles as I start to try and put together an essay (3000 words) for a Uni module – “Facilitating Workplace Learning.” It has been decreed that all nurses in our area (of band five and above) have to have this qualification. When asked my preference for when I’d like to do it I said, “As long as it doesn’t interfere with my gardening.” Three weeks later I had been allocated a funded place.
I’m not against the idea, of course, that all qualified nurses should have adequate skills to support the student in the workplace and be aware of the current thinking on best practice, theories of learning and all that. Not at all. It’s just daunting. And a module of a Uni course is pretty time consuming and my life is pretty full anyway.
So here I am. Procrastinating. And determined to get an A.
There I’ve said it. If I’m going to do this basted course, I may as well do it properly.
It’s a long while since I did this sort of study. 1991, in fact. The first study day was nearly two weeks ago. I came home with an armful of handouts a list of things to do and read and a splitting headache.
Tomorrow is the follow up day. I have learned a lot already.
I shall go in armed with paracetamol, my own mug, some decent tea bags, sandwiches and a cushion, taking on board the most basic of the theories: Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. Unless the basic needs are attended to no one is ready for the next stage.
And I shall sit well away from two specific course members who continually chattered last time. And I won’t panic when evern more lists of recommended reading are handed out.
Any more tips, anyone?
Boadicea's Chariot 
pseu
Don’t know about any tips, the last reference book I consulted was ‘sums for the bewildered infant’ when I was five. But I do sometimes wonder how far we would have advanced as a society if all this form filling and obsession with ‘qualifications’. How long would Florence Nightingale have put up with ‘risk analysis’ and ‘facilitating workplace learning’ in the rat ridden filth of Scutari. How would the British Soldier have coped at D Day if just before he hit the beach some johnnie popped up and ‘hang on chaps’ some of you don’t have your NVQs, it’s all off’. We all seemed to rub along without them years ago, I would venture to suggest we could all get along very well without them now, by just relying on ‘common sense’.
So long as you can pick up the jargon and then reproduce it in essays, you’ll be fine. Just don’t expect to learn much that is useful.
Frankly it is a ranking obscenity when people in NHS hospitals are neglected as they are.
Ludicrous farting around with jobsworth bits of paper, mutual chuffing and general arselicking of the hierarchy has deskilled most employees to the point that the only job they can do competently is to swing the lead! I have been appalled over the last ten years at the standards in UK hospitals, both the cleaning, nursing and junior doctors.
One of the big problems of being employed by the behemoth state machine is the necessity of swallowing large amounts of total shit and developing the ability to look as if you are enjoying it!
I find it difficult that you have been allowed to practice for 20 years without refresher courses, very worrisome. All professional jobs in the USA, such as teachers, nurses, doctors, pilots etc etc only have limited licences and must credit so many study hours every year to maintain such, no refreshers, no licence, no job!
Thinking about that explains a lot of the differences!!!
It is always a dreadful problem when one has allowed the brains to mush by intellectual inactivity and a very hard grind to get them back.
Christina, I have done lots of refresher courses. When I say it’s a long time since I did this sort of study, I didn’t mean I had done none!
I will clarify further.
I work as a relief district nurse, helping out in teams where they are short staffed. I rarely have contact with student nurses.
The difference with this study and the updates I have done in the last few years is that the courses I have chosen to do and those I am required to do so far have all been highly relevant to my area of practice. (For example leg ulcer care, falls awareness, manual handling, to name a few.)
I would rather be studying for something which has more direct impact on my clinical work, although I do see the benefit of this course.
Take your point, relevant courses are a necessity to keep up with new practice and new products etc, this is just eyewash, but if you have to, you have to!
Could one practice for 20 years now on just the original RN in the UK?
I do know you can teach forever without doing anything much.
Maybe it is a matter of morale and short handedness, but most nurses on the ward are either having endless coffee breaks in staffrooms or are lurking behind stations messing with computers and chatting 19 to the dozen.
They really didn’t like me< I used to go winkle them out and make them attend patients, not the boy, I did him myself but others were just left by the hour! Total disgrace.
pseu1
Sounds like the usual Liberal PC Brainwashing probably put forward by Common Purpose or some other bunch of incompetent fascists. As you point out you’ve got enough real work to do and there are probably some real courses available which would be of value. Instead of which the taxpayer has been unwittingly coerced into funding a course that you don’t need and which could compromise your ability to do your real job.
BTW is there a pseu2
Jeez, Christina, you seem to have been particularly liverish today what with shooting chefs, keeping a loaded shotgun under your bed, burning some errant flunkey’s kit in the driveway, et al. 🙂
Before you draw a bead on my noggin, though, may I just say that my 30 year-long previous professional incarnation was continually under what they call today “peer review” and that my much shorter and very different career here in Portugal required passing exams to become qualified in the first place and an annual gathering of points by way of attending workshops and such bullshine in order to stay “current”. Even though I’m now retired, I still do the BS as an academic exercise.
OZ
Pseu – If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a million times – never procrastinate.
OZ
The word ‘procrastinate’ is not in my vocabulary. I’d look it up, but I can’t be bothered.
If I have this right (and it is very early in the morning!) – you don’t seem to think that the effort you’re going to have to put into this course (especially to do well) will be of value to you because you don’t have many dealings with students.
Hardly surprising that you’re procrastinating! Nothing worse than ‘having’ to do something that you think is a waste of (very precious) time.
If you can’t persuade those who sent you on the course to change their minds, then the only thing to do is to chop the assignments into small pieces and do them in between doing something you enjoy…
Advice from The Supreme Procrastinator – I have a huge project that I keep putting off, and putting off and … !
OZ, no not particularly!
I just get so fed up with all these jobsworth schemes that the taxpayer is supposed to pay for.
Having been self employed for over 30 years and standing and falling on my own two feet, I just resent such parasitism.
I’m glad I’m not paying for it anymore, well at least not as much as I was!
It took spousal unit years to understand why one fiddled one’s income tax in the UK, and that it was the bounden moral duty of any right minded citizen to keep the govt’s dirty little mitts off of one’s hard earned loot!
One wouldn’t have minded if they had run the public services properly, but they don’t! Just hand it out to any hard luck case passing, and if its some grubby little foreign African country full of aids and corruption they double the amount and add in their birthday!
The whole thing stinks and the sooner it collapses into total chaos the better, a clean out of the Augean stables is well overdue! Too many immigrants, too many indigenous workshy, too many jobsworths, too many bizarre PC paper qualifications, too many spy cameras, too many and too much of anything except a bit of common bloody sense!
I resent bitterly having been driven out of the UK by the tax schedule, DOUBLE what we pay here! Through ineptitude and incompetence. I miss Wales dreadfully, but nothing to be done, I really cannot keep commuting over the pond, if you do that you might be able to avoid the taxes but cannot garden! Plus all the attendant hoo haa of self destructing wog underpants and the dogs! It is all too expensive for words.
It pisses me off seriously, especially when one hears things like this crap that pseud has to mess with to keep her grade.
A cheerful red rag to a bull, or in this case the old cow!
Never mind, rant over, will FO up the greenhouse, about the only place I am serene these days.
maybe I should not read the UK papers or talk to the Uk residents anymore!
Yes, Christina there is a minimum standard of study that all RGN’s have to do- seen as the bare minimum and everyone I know does more than the minimum. You can’t stay on the reigister unless you do that
Hm, Tina; yes, another rant, but forgive my saying so, you sound as though you are not happy, to put it mildly. Considering what has happened I’m not surprised. When your son died, you received a lot of support from most of us on MyT which I hoped helped, albeit it a small way. I’m sorry that “your mountain” and garden have not achieved the healing for which you hoped. It sounds as though you are missing Pembs and your support network, which is understandable, rather more than you suppose you might. You sound bored, frustrated and isolated.
I apologise if I am reading more into your recent comments than you intend to convey, but I’m not sure if I have ever heard you sound so at a loss.
Evening Nym: it must be a source of irritation to be forced to put so much work into something which will be of limited benefit to you in helping your patients. Having a daughter working for the NHS, I sympathise. It is the system which should be blamed and not those who are trying to do their best for their long suffering patients (clients?).
Araa, thank you for the thought, but I don’t actually think this one is boy related, many are, but not this one. I do miss Wales dreadfully, always do, only place I am ever truly amused. I just get so mad at the way the UK has been trashed, it is so frustrating that there is nothing one can do about it either.
I have not been very well of late which I think is the primary consideration, rather than boredom.
Sorry to hear you haven’t been well, Tina and it must be a big adjustment leaving friends behind. Yes, there is a lot wrong with the situation in the UK, but to be honest, in most places life just carries on pretty much as usual, but then most of us here, at our age are lucky enough to live in pleasant surroundings with no great financial problems. I appreciate this is not the case for everyone though.
Christina @ #12 – Sigh! You have enunciated my own thughts exactly. Should anything untoward suddenly happen to spousal unit, a wayward gunshot for example, then do please let me know. 🙂
OZ
Evening all.
Sorry you’ve been unwell Christina. Hope you’re feeling properly better soon. Maybe a visit back to Wales to help the homesickness too wouldn’t go amiss? I echo Araminta’s no 17 (where is the sharp symbol on this key board?)
hi Ara, If I’m totally honest I feel the course is a good thing overall. After all it’s not just students who need teaching… I’m just not in the right frame of mind to undertake the thing and feel it’s being foisted uppon many folk who are not keen to do it.
However the last couple of days have been better. I can actually feel Spring’s around the corner and I’ve seen two special friends today which has helped me re-gain some perspective. .
Just imagine: a trip to wales as therapy. Further proof that it takes all sorts….. 🙂
Bolleaux – Make that “thoughts”. Ta!
Morgen, Janus. Is Wales srill closed on Sundays?
OZ
When I was little, we used to take family holidays in or around Criccieth, Pwllheli and Llanystumdwy (where Lloyd George was born, though he didn’t know my father), so I have great memories of North Wales. Not so keen on the South, though.
OFFS! “Still”. Sorry, it’s pre-dawn and still dark in The Cave.
OZ
OZ, only the minds, I believe.
Oh, sorry, should I have written ‘mines’? no, right first time. 😉
Bearsy! I remember you – you were that weird, hairy kid on the beach at Abersoch with the knitted swimmers and the mask. It was more than half a century ago – how you doin’?
OZ
If only, Oz! Hirsuteness has never been a quality of mine, I fear, avatar and nickname notwithstanding. Never mind, bore da, bach!
OZ I do not have any immediate plans for ‘offing’ no 3! I’m rather fond of him!
Janus, no 20, funny!
I spent a lot of time running around N. Wales carrying heavy packs. Probably jaundiced my view of the place.
Christina – Oh yes, I remember now from your gardening posts on t’other side last year. No 3 is the youung buck with the rippling muscles, glistening torso and gleaming teeth, isn’t he? 😉
OZ