East Lancashire NHS Foundation Trust

Availability of placement sites for orthoptic students has been an ongoing issue for many years. Many placement sites go above and beyond to accommodate students often at short notice, creating added pressure to already busy departments. The Equitable Placement Allocation scheme was designed by the three universities currently offering the orthoptic degree (The University of Liverpool, The University of Sheffield and Glasgow Caledonian) as a way to relieve the pressure on these sites and hopefully allow for a surplus of placement sites available for orthoptic students.

This eWIN case study looks at reducing placement attrition at East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust (ELHT).

Attrition within student nurses is a long-standing and well documented problem within the UK (Orton. S. 2011). For some nursing programmes the attrition rate can be as high as 50% (Lord Willis, 2015).

This re-designed and enhanced drop-in service was introduced by East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust to improve access and quality of service for patients with low back pain. The service is  run by experienced physiotherapists who offer early assessment advice and reassurance. Waiting times are now minimal, duplicate referrals and unnecessary diagnostics have been vastly reduced, and patient outcomes are good with improved productivity.

East Lancashire NHS Trust’s Integrated Respiratory Service (IRS) has developed a specialist ten to twelve week placement for student nurses, which allows students to gain clinical experience in a specialist nursing role, rather than within a traditional ward or outpatient setting.Trainees gain an understanding of the specialist respiratory nursing role as well how that role works alongside other members of the multi-disciplinary team.