Practice makes up 50% of your learning, equivalent to 2,300 hours over the duration of the course. This experience will help you develop self-awareness in a real world context and also prepare you for the rigour of professional practice by providing you with the opportunity to observe deliver and apply professional values in action, and prepare you for employment.

Nurses work across a challenging and changing landscape of health care provision today. To ensure your placements reflect this, we work closely with practice partners to continually review, update and expand placements to ensure they reflect the demands of contemporary and future health care provision.

You will have 19 to 20 weeks of stimulating practice learning in each part of the programme, interspersed with University based learning. You will experience 24 hour care over a 7 day week while in the practice setting, which could be located in any setting across the region.

We use a 'hub and spoke' pattern to the allocation of your placements. This involves working in your 'hub' placement with a trained assessor (mentor), and 'spoke' placements which provide a comprehensive learning experience for you.

Example of a hub and spoke placement pattern

Your mentors will take responsibility for guiding your practice learning and assessing your competence in the following areas of nursing practice

• professional values
• communication and interpersonal skills
• nursing practice and decision making
• leadership, management and team-working

Throughout your progress on placement(s) you will be given formal and informal constructive feedback.