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Placements

Placements

Buckinghamshire New University is a Placements Plus university. So, whatever degree you do, you can be sure there’ll be plenty of industry-relevant opportunities on offer, to help you get into your chosen field.

We’ll also prepare you for work beforehand, with special Skills for Work training, further boosting your CV, and building skills employers will value. In recognition of the value we place on these skills we have incorporated this experience into your study time.

Placements Plus is all about helping you get some valuable experience under your belt while you’re a student. To increase your choices later, and help you get the graduate-level job you want.

Thanks to our close links with employers like Thames Valley Police, Wycombe Wanderers and the NHS, we can offer our students some great quality internships and placements – both formal ones and others arranged on a more ad-hoc basis through our established contacts in each industry.

Once you’re on placement, we’ll stay in touch with you, and visit you regularly, to check you are getting on well, and getting the most value from the experience.

 

If you study nursing with us, thanks to our close links with the NHS, we can offer you a wide choice of clinical experiences in different health settings, depending on the course you are on and where your interests lie.

We offer placements over a large geographical area in north west and central London (adult, children’s and mental health), Buckinghamshire and Berkshire (children’s).

You will be allocated a ‘home base’, which will be at one of the major hospitals in the region. This is where you’ll complete most of your clinical experience (although if you’re studying children’s or mental health nursing, you’ll work throughout the whole NHS region to gain a broad range of experiences).

While you are on placement, a member of our teaching staff will be assigned to your clinical area, and will visit you to see how you are doing, and offer you any support you might need.

As a nursing student, you will spend 50% of your course at the University and the other 50% out on clinical experience at one of our local NHS trusts or independent care partners.

Students may be eligible to claim back some of their placement expenses through the Learning Support Fund.

 

During your Social Work programme at Buckinghamshire New University, you will go on out on assessed placements throughout your course. The Social Work Team sources placements within a 25-mile radius of the High Wycombe campus.

You will work within different kinds of organisations related to Social Work and gain experience of relevant statutory tasks and duties. You will also develop the skills and competencies you’ll need to be able to practise as a Social Worker when you graduate.

We work with a broad range of organisations to offer interesting social work placements, including Local Authorities, Healthcare Trusts, voluntary and independent sectors.

 

As clinical practice is a large part of our operating department practice courses, we work closely with several NHS trusts to provide clinical placements for all our students.

Going out on placement will give you the chance to experience working in a fully functional operating theatre. You’ll work with anaesthetics, surgery and recovery teams, and get first-hand insight into the skills needed to provide effective patient care.

Developing your knowledge in these areas, across a variety of clinical settings, will help you to meet the competencies required to be able to register with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) when you graduate.

During your placement, a clinical member of staff will provide mentorship, supervise your experience, and make sure you are meeting the requirements of the course. Teaching staff at BNU will also be there to support you.

You will spend around 35% of your course time at university, and the rest on placement.

Students may be eligible to claim back some of their placement expenses through the Learning Support Fund

Placement systems

BNU delivers a large number of placement opportunities for our students. We use our placements management system (InPlace) to plan and coordinate these. For Nursing, we also have an electronic assessment tool (ePAD), and hope to extend this to other disciplines in the near future. Find out more below.

Four female students walking outside Gateway building at High Wycombe campus
Electronic Practice Assessment Documents (ePADS)

The ePAD is an online platform which will enable students to gain valuable feedback and sign-off in practice, electronically, and record their practice hours.

The ePAD is predominantly accessed online via a website, accompanied by iOS and android mobile apps enabling students to complete documentation and record practice hours online, or offline on a mobile device.

A Nurse looking on a tablet dressed in their uniform
InPlace

InPlace provides a centralised repository of all placement data, promoting collaborative working, and enabling more efficient and standardised processing. Introduced in September 2020, InPace went live as BNUs placement management system and is available for Nursing, Social Work, Operating Department Practitioner (ODP) and Physician Associates disciplines with existing placement activities incorporated into the curriculum.