Service user and carer involvement in nurse education

These pages have been created in partnership with Health Education England to form a ‘How To’ guide on involving service users and carers in nurse education. The aim is to illustrate the potential and spur readers on to further development of this agenda, rather than insisting on compliance with a set of strict rules or funding conditions. These webpages have been co-produced with service users, carers and education staff – and written in real time, so anyone could suggest improvements as the resource develops (view a discussion of this approach to coproduction here and see another example of a website that has been crowd-resourced and crowd-moderated here).

These pages represent the culmination of the first stage of the work (October 2016 to January 2017) and consists of text and hyperlinks to resources. In the second stage, communications specialists transfereed the resources to a Health Education England website and enhanced the presentation. The results can be seen here.

The project covers England and includes all four fields of nursing practice – Child, Adult, Mental Health and Learning Disability. It ranges from pre-registration to some aspects of post-qualification continuous professional development. The ‘How To’ Guide will help a range of stakeholders, including

• students and staff who are engaged in learning
• service users and carers who offer their personal experience of illness or disability to support nurse education
• university lecturers and training department staff in healthcare organisations
• clinical supervisors who are providing learning experiences for students and staff undertaking professional development.
• Involvement leads, who have responsibility of ensuring that service users and carers are involved  appropriately
• Inspection and quality assurance people, who need to know what good practice looks like.

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As this Guide addresses a wide range of organisations (NHS, charity and commercial providers of nursing services as well as further and higher education), there is no single organisational spot that we can specify where service user and carer involvement will be located and embedded. For some, service user and carer involvement in nurse education will have its own dedicated infrastructure, while for others it will be part of the work of a wider faculty or health service. Furthermore, parallel innovations in social work, medicine and elsewhere can help to inform best practice in nurse education, so there may be some items in these pages from this wider context. This all means that the resources and issues set out here must be ‘cut to size’ and adapted to suit individual circumstances.

The hyperlinks below allow you to jump straight into the detail, starting exactly where you please. Any time you see underlined text, it is a hyperlink. I hope that the titles are  self-explanatory, but not everything fits neatly under a single heading. Indeed, the best results often blend a range of issues into one creative solution! So, if you are looking for something in particular, start with the best guess heading from the list below, and then use the search box at the top of the screen to double check that you have found everything.

The background Foreword by Ruth Auton Who are service users and carers? Benefits of involving service users and carers ​The UK policy context ​ Theorising about involvement Further reading Networks and links​​​ ​Involve service users and carers Publicity and communications ​Recruit service users and carers​​ Train service users and carers ​Support and supervision for service users and carers ​​Payments and other rewards Including children and young people​ ​Reasonable adjustments

The student journey ​Shaping the curriculum for students Student recruitment ​ ​​Delivering teaching sessions Teaching resources ​Student assessment Clinical placements Preceptorship and continuing professional development  Get organised Budget and staffing​ Form an Advisory Group​ ​Define roles ​Measure success Local policies and procedures ​Governance and risk management