Overview

Any placement allocation process involves three stakeholders - the Trust who will be coordinating and hosting the students on placement, the university where the students undertake classroom study and where the final degree will be provided, and the students themselves.

There is a range of contexts which require consideration. For example, the universities will have set dates when placements should take place, and these are usually particular for each university. Some universities will require students to visit specific types of wards over the course of their placements, while others may be more flexible.

Similarly, the trust has requirements that must be met. Each ward at a hospital has a maximum student hosting capacity, and this can vary depending on the student’s current year of study. Wards must also keep to internal Education Audit Standards to ensure they can provide necessary support to students, and this must be checked regularly.

When these requirements are combined with the fact that trusts can have relationships with multiple universities, placing students at tens of wards at a time, it is clear such complex schedules could be time consuming for a placement coordinator to produce. It was calculated the generation of placements for a single year group of students from one university can take each trust anywhere between five and ten hours. Given multiple universities and multiple intakes the time spent scheduling placements can easily stretch into hundreds of hours for each trust, each year.

Presently time limitations and the lack of quantification ability presented by the manual process mean it is not feasible for placements to cover a range of disciplines and specialities, yet this is something universities would like to support to enhance skills development of nurse placements.