Undergraduate nursing education, a comprehensive view of the reality of nursing practice

Miriam Hernández Mellado

Abstract

We are in 2020, the year declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the international year of the nurse and midwife. The Official College of Nursing of Madrid (CODEM), joins the Nursing Now campaign in February 2019, registering as official group Nursing Now Community of Madrid; and leading this campaign will frame different activities that will be developed throughout the current year.

These actions will be carried out with the main objective of making nursing care visible to society, to which nurses attend day after day from our different points of care work, without forgetting the management, research and teaching work that nurses develop and that are perhaps the least known among the population.

In order to make nursing care visible among the community, it is necessary that these informative sessions and different conferences that will be held within the Nursing Now movement can be attended by the whole of Madrid society, with the aim that our patients get to know us and our home, CODEM.

Currently, from my work in Primary Care, I tutor a student in the third year of the Nursing Degree, and discussing experiences with colleagues in the profession, we came to the conclusion that we focus too much from our position as practice tutor on teaching the nursing praxis that is carried out at the care level.

It is clear that the acquisition of competencies and skills in professional nursing practice is of utmost importance, but perhaps we should take on a new challenge. Nurses are increasingly aware of the importance of postgraduate education and nursing research as the main pillar for the creation of the body of knowledge of our discipline, and it is this conviction that we should transmit to our undergraduate nursing students. How? By accompanying them to continuing education conferences, congresses, seminars or other activities so that from their undergraduate training they are aware of the need for nurses to continue advancing: creating and improving the nursing doctrinal corpus, making our work visible among the population so that they know when they should go to their nurse. During their practical training, undergraduate nursing students should be imbued with this need and this concern that we nurses feel to continue increasing our "doctrinal corpus".

By implementing this measure among the tutors of undergraduate students, we ensure that before they begin their working life they learn about nursing research work and not only from their classrooms in the faculty but also from the nursing office, from school nursing, or from specialized care nursing, among others.

I write these lines from my experience today at the CODEM where I went with my third year nursing student to the informative session on FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) in which the first part was presented by Primary Care nurses who are experts on the subject and the second part was very emotional because it was about the experiences of four African women lived in first person; PLG, as the student is called, has today discovered another face of the nursing discipline: research, the need to continue training continuously and that finishing the nursing degree is not the end of their training is only the beginning to continue advancing in our profession.

Therefore, from this personal experience I encourage all my colleagues in the profession to insist that our future nurses insist on the need to research, to write, to set themselves challenges and to break the so famous glass ceilings against which today women and nursing have to continue to fight.

Miriam Hernández Mellado.