By Dr Jane Wray, Senior Lecturer in Nursing, Hull University, and Senior Clinical Nurse Advisor (National Preceptorship Programme) The ‘Educator Workforce Strategy1 was recently released in England has acknowledged the urgent need for workforce investment and capacity building across practice and academic settings. Health-care expectations continue to shift, new information technologies emerge, practice requirements continue to evolve and as a consequence the educator role has increasingly diversified2 with evolving competencies and skills3. The role has become complex and challenging to deli ..read more

This week we hear from Jenna Waldram, a Midwife working predominately on Labour suite and triage in a busy tertiary hospital. Having previously worked in A&E as an HCA, Jenna often reflects on the Advanced Practitioners she knew and admired there and wondered why such a pathway didn’t seem as prominent in Midwifery. In this blog Jenna takes us through some of the recent UK developments regarding Advanced Clinical Practitioner roles in Midwifery. November 2022 saw the release of Health Education England’s (HEE) Advanced Clinical Practice in Midwifery Capabilities Framework (2022). This fram ..read more

The focus of International Nurses Day 2023 is Our Nurses, Our Future. At a time when the nursing workforce is under more pressure than ever before Evidence Based Nursing (EBN) are focusing on what needs to be done to support our nursing workforce to thrive. We support nurses right to strike and the need for better pay and conditions but we also want to reflect on what can be done to help our nurses flourish. Alongside this blog we have made three commentaries free to access to mark International Nurses Day 2023. Visit our website by clicking here for more information. Looking after our nurses ..read more

This week’s blog is written by Alwin Puthenpurakal (@AlwinP13), a Senior Lecturer at London South Bank University (@LSBU; @LSBU_HSC). Swahili is a widely spoken language. Over 200 million speakers across more than 14 countries (Lisanza, 2021). In 2021, the United Nations designated 7th of July as the World Kiswahili language day to celebrate Swahili as a language (UNESCO, 2021). Jabali means ‘strong and bold bond’ in Swahili and Jabali Men’s Network epitomises this strength with the wealth of knowledge and cultural vibrancy from male nurses from Africa, India and the Far East. The birth of Jab ..read more

This week’s blog has been written by Dr Carol Gray Brunton, from Edinburgh Napier University, UK and highlights the vital role that nurses and health professionals play in addressing beliefs around vaccines. Vaccination is one of the most successful public health interventions in developing countries through the eradication of infectious diseases. Achieving high vaccination rates are important for ‘herd’ immunity to protect the general population against disease [1]. World Immunisation Week 24-30th April 2023, “The Big Catch-Up”, aims to support countries to reach pre-2019 immunisation target ..read more

  This week’s blog comes from Charlotte Jakab-Hall, Senior Practice Development Nurse and Peer Support Guardian and Leonora King, Practice Development Nurse and Peer Support Guardian at Gloucester Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.   Blog summary Gloucestershire Staff Transition and Retention Support Network (GloSTaRs) was co-created by two early career nurses following their preceptorship programme in 2018, where they identified a need for improvement in staff wellbeing. The network continuously contributes to building better cultures of wellbeing and peer support in the workplace and ..read more

  In March, this year I was excited because two projects that I had put years of work into were coming to fruition. The projects had much in common: the clinical problem was delirium; were being undertaken in hospitals; and were a partnership between academics and clinicians. My clinical partners were senior nursing staff who I had spent years developing a relationship with and were very invested in reducing delirium in their respective hospitals. Project planning had considered the demands of undertaking research in the clinical setting, yet we still underestimated the speed humps that w ..read more

This week EBN’s Associate Editor Elizabeth Bailey summarises a recent report on global maternal mortality and considers drivers impacting progress in global maternal safety. In recent months, a report describing estimates of global maternity mortality rates was published jointly by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, World Bank Group and UNDESA/Population Division [1]. The report entitled Trends in maternal mortality 2000 to 2020 [1] presented data which illustrated the variation in maternal mortality rates that persist across the globe and throughout the 20 years the report covered, as well as benchmarking p ..read more

This week’s blog is by Roger Kline (@rogerkline) who is a Research Fellow at Middlesex University Business School. In just one month the NHS has lost four Employment Tribunals in which judges heavily criticised NHS Trusts for race discrimination, another Trust had to apologise for repeated examples of racist behaviour by its staff towards colleagues and patients, whilst a national NHS body was found to have deliberately covered up racism. In three of the four Tribunals involved race discrimination against nurses and midwives. Michelle Cox was a nurse manager of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME ..read more

Blog by Jo McVey (Lecturer of Mental Health Nursing) at Glasgow Caledonian University. Being a Nurse Team Leader in Older Adult Community Mental Health Services is three-fold: there is the management of staff, the management of a caseload of patients, and the management of a service. The advice given is “be prepared and be organised,” however, the reality is that we must be prepared to be unprepared. When I was a student nurse, someone told me mental health nursing was all about “chatting to patients and drinking lots of coffee” – I have always wondered where that magical clinical area was. &n ..read more