Gaining knowledge in hard times
Published: 17 November 2011
Can we still find training and education opportunities in radiology nursing despite cutbacks? Maggie Williams writes.
Difficult to get access
The Department of Health (DH) in its document Interventional Radiology: Guidance for service delivery (2010) states that ‘The current constraints to delivering a comprehensive service are explored … and include: ... a lack of an appropriately trained workforce including dedicated training and consultant posts in IR with clear career pathways. This also applies to nurses and radiographers’. The document states that there should be an organisational commitment to the provision of multi-professional education and training to provide the interventional radiology (IR) workforce of the future.
Despite the DH’s recognition of the importance of training, in the current climate of financial turbulence, education and training seems to have become an area where cutbacks have been severe. The possibility of attending external courses has been curtailed for all of us and reduction in staff numbers means that even in-house training is not always possible.
How the forum can help
Yet it remains important to recognise the true benefits of ensuring that training and education continue in our departments. There are a number of institutions around the UK that are holding study days at a very small cost and this includes the Imaging Nurses Forum, which took the decision this year not to hold the traditional annual conference at Cavendish Square but to hold a series of workshops at venues around the UK. This, combined with the reduced fee of £40, will hopefully make training more accessible to all our members.
On the road
The first workshop is on Friday, 18 November 2011 in Cardiff, followed by Edinburgh on 3 March, Sunderland on 15 June 2012, London on 6 October 2012 and Birmingham on 17 November 2012. We have some high-quality speakers at these workshops and will cover topics such as:
• interventional services 24/7
• implications for the nursing workforce
• safety in the environment – lead aprons, personal safety and risk assessments
• radiation safety
• aortic aneurysm care pathway
• cardiac imaging, the past, the present and the future
• forum activity update and open discussion.
Keeping in the loop
The importance of holding specialist qualifications and the benefit to patients of having specially trained imaging nurses should be reflected in our conversations with managers. There are a number of universities offering courses relevant to imaging nurses. This includes: Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, which offers a distance-learning course in interventional radiology nursing; and Anglia Ruskin University, which offers a module titled ‘Principles of conscious sedations for health care professionals’.
If you know of a course/study day that it happening in your area, please email the editor at community.editor@rcn.org.uk and this date can be advertised on the forum web page.
We need to work smartly in the way that we provide education but ensure that education is provided to enable us to keep up to date and provide evidence-based care to our patients. The well-educated team is often the one that is able to work most effectively.
We want to hear from you!
The effective use of audit is a great way of improving practice; perhaps in future newsletters we could share audits completed in our workplaces. There is very little nurse-led research in imaging. Have you carried out a piece of research? Can you share it with your colleagues? If so, please email the editor at: community.editor@rcn.org.uk.