Should social nursing be its own field of nursing?

This week, the blog is by Stephanie Reynolds, senior lecturer, conducting the nursing course of MSC, Birmingham City University (stephanie.recienolds@bcu.ac.uk)

After examining the origin in the sector of social nursing, and particularly of regional nursing as a part of education, adult nurses before registration, I asked whether social nursing needs to be a nursing field/ separate branch along with the remaining 4 areas: adult nursing, nursing, children, learning and mental health. I’m asking about this because nursing education for adults, especially in recent times, has change into very secondary care, specializing in a lot of the destination of student nurse in hospital conditions. Equally secondary care is dominated by academic teaching as a consequence of the undeniable fact that most lecturers of the nurse come from secondary care. Given NMC, it focuses mainly on acute care and technical skills, in contrast to more subtle skills adapted to basic healthcare, resembling holistic assessment, autonomous work and stopping admission to the hospital. The suggestion that social nursing needs to be a field independently, has been identified for nearly twenty years, and yet it was still not officially returned or recognized by national bodies resembling NMC. However, there’s a spread of subordinate NMC to have a concentrated course on the community, which has been implemented in isolated areas across the country, particularly on the University of Roehampton. Thanks to the plans to develop the working force in the sector of increased care locally, with a purpose to relieve the pressure on secondary care, more interest in social nursing care needs to be generated. Current academic teaching programs without the specifications of community learning, however the combined approach may mean that students before registration lose the influence of increased consciousness of community learning, especially in the event that they weren’t supplied with community internship during their education.

The profile of social nursing in education reflects the interest of the media, through which attention almost all the time focuses on care within the secondary environment. There are many popular hospital dramas, and knowledge information all the time uses a hospital as a spot for a breakthrough of interesting media stories, which Covid19 is one such examples through which the clarusians for guardians took place outside the entrances to the hospital. The emergency shiver attracts the eye of potential adult nursing students in order that they need to be life and have a “heroic” career to strive. Similarly, accidents and emergency and demanding care places are perceived as the ultimate possibility of learning, through which there’s numerous actions, and doing something to a patient, and never working with them on his care, is perceived as more powerful than observing and enthusiastic about the broader problems with the person needs of the patient. As a manager of placing within the environment, I discovered that students often ask how they might achieve their “skills”, and it was suggested that the location of social nursing was less vital when it comes to science. I often identified that they were learning various skills towards the plain practical ones presented within the documents regarding the location. This is what nursing education must accept that social nursing differs from secondary nursing. This shouldn’t be a smaller field, neither is it removable or somewhere where you retire, because myths were announced that result from the dominance of secondary care and appear to be unquestioned by a specialty that will be hidden behind closed doors. It is a specialized field through which the more you learn, the more you will likely be within the management of complex patients at home with social and financial aspects, along with physical aspects. This is an environment through which you may learn to diagnose complex health problems and see how patients improve since you worked with them, construct a relationship with them and gave knowledge to be certain that they’ll handle themselves and your condition. This gives the opportunity of autonomous work, prescribing adapted care, prescribing medicines and management or deester directly as a lonely worker, and so they are difficult and specialist skills, removed from work suitable for an individual able to retire.

The path of newly qualified students, to change into social nurses, needs to be accepted and valued at national level from the very starting, and thus from the start of education before registration. Nurses do not need to be divided, but respect their different skills. Preliminary data from my students’ research shows that they don’t feel confident that they’ve employment locally directly from the qualifications, adapting to a different myth that they need a hospital experience of first5.

Reference
1. Reynolds, s (2024) Habitus and field of district nursing: discussion on its skilled and symbolic status of the capital. BR Community Nurses. 2024 December 2; 29 (12): 565-574. DOI: 10.12968/BJN 2014.0081
2. Longley, M., Shaw, C., I Dolan, G. (2007). Nursing: In 2015: Alternative scenarios for healthcare, nursing and nurses in Great Britain in 2015 London: Nursing Council and Midwife.
3. Willis, L. (2015) raising the bar; The shape of the care review. Review of future education and training of registered nurses and assistants. Health education England
4. Queens Nursing Institute. Placing community nursing before registration. Survey report. 2022.
5. White, R (2019) The truth about district nursing. Nursing in practice https://www.nursinginpractice.com/professional/the-truth-about-district-nursing/

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