Working alongside the NHS requires universities to constantly be adapting.
The relationship between universities and the health and social care sector can be described as evolutionary. For decades, nurses were trained directly on wards, with schools of nursing traditionally hosted by individual hospitals.
Training began to move towards higher education in the mid-1990s, but it took until 2009 for a full degree (level 6) to be needed to enter the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s professional register. At that point, universities became reliant on the NHS to offer placements to their students, with local hospitals sometimes feeling that they had little control over the development of their future workforce. This was compounded by the huge expansion of student numbers in the 2010s.
In recent years, the dynamic has changed once more with the advent of new training routes such as degree apprenticeships, which give employers more choice over how staff are educated and require universities to develop different relationships – yet again – with their NHS partners.
