Practice Placement Support App

Ensuring that both students and mentors are able to access support information during practice placement and are able to escalate support issues to relevant staff, is an essential pre-requisite to high quality practice based learning.

To achieve this OSIME RDG have been asked to develop an app that students and practice mentors can use to assist them in accessing placement related information, planning placement related learning and accessing personal support during placement.

The app development is led by a nurse lecturer within HELS, Scott Colton, who had already done a great deal of work in storyboarding the app and working through the issues and challenges it needed to address. It also responds to some ground breaking research conducted by another academic, Louise Hunt, which explored why some assessors find it difficult to fail students during practice placement assessments.  

The app is now in development following completion of the design and emulation phases with a view to trial with students during the summer of 2016.

Academic Leads: Scott Colton – Lecturer Nursing, Louise Hunt – Senior Lecturer, Nursing, Mike Adams – Associate Head of School - NMSP

Lead App Developer – Paul Hammond – Front-End Developer OSIME RD

Back End Developer – Xi Guo – Software Engineer OSIME RDG

Lead Visualisation – Mark Richards – 3D Artist OSIME RDG

More information can be found in the following publications:

Colton, S. and Hunt, L., 2016. Developing a smartphone app to support the nursing community. Nursing Management, 22 (9), pp.24-28

Hunt, L.A., McGee, P., Gutteridge, R. and Hughes, M., 2016. Failing securely: The processes and support which underpin English nurse mentors' assessment decisions regarding under-performing students. Nurse Education Today, 39, pp.79-86.