Mental Health Nursing - your questions answered! video transcript

My name is Angela Pereira, I'm a senior lecturer on the Mental Health Nursing team at the University of Derby. The Mental Health Nursing BSc programme is a three-year course split into three parts; part one, part two, part three, and in each part you'll have a theory blocks and you'll have placement blocks.

Mental health nursing course is for anybody that's got an interest in working with human beings and the complexity of the human condition, and a lot of people coming to mental health nursing to help others and to make a difference to people's lives. To be honest, I think Derby as a university is large enough to feel like you've got that real university experience, but it's small enough to feel like you belong to a family and I think with the mental health nursing degree we use that as a selling point because we are very very close to our students and it's a really... cosy, almost comfortable feel.

We also have a great reputation for nursing courses which without question and 100% of our student nurses that come off our mental health programmes are employed within six months. In relation to the other aspects, support, we support our students really well we want them to achieve we want them to succeed and that includes supporting them through their programme, hence why we allocate a personal tutor to every first-year student and that tutor stays with them for the whole three years of their degree to help them with their academic progress and their work.

The placement opportunities are diverse, and the course is split 50 50, so 50% theory 50% placement, and out on placement is where students get the opportunity to put all the theory they're learning into practise with real patients, real people that need their help. Typical example of placements? We use inpatient wards, we have community teams, we use prisons custody suites, there's a massive diversity of placement opportunities.

I work on a great team a great team of lecturers at the University of Derby, we are all registered nurses, we're all qualified teachers but we have this massive wide range of experience. We have camhs specialists, we have community specialists, I myself am a forensic specialist, so we can cover a wide range of teaching experiences and have lots and lots of stories for students as well which just adds to the teaching opportunities.

For students on the mental health nursing programme, aside from the usual practical and technical skills we are a university that wants to be involved in our community, so we will find opportunities for our students to go out there and get involved in the community such as marking world mental health day and creating campaigns for that and going out to the community, but also we've been out and delivered meals to the YMCA colleges as part of a community project. I think the diversity of an array of career opportunities with a mental health nursing degree are vast.

And there's the usual areas such as going to work for large trusts or for independent organisations that provide mental health services, but there's the army, the navy, the police and there are now large organisations are actually looking independently at supporting their workers and their employees in relation to their mental health issues.

Mental Health Nursing - your questions answered! video

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