Amelia

Most of our placements have been an average of about 10 weeks long. 

I’ve been at a specialised dementia care home, which was really good because it's a really specific area and a totally unique mental health condition because it’s organic. It’s more about quality of life and management than recovery.

I then went to an acute mental health setting, for when people are detained under the Mental Health Act, or come in as an informal patient when they’ve hit crisis point. Those people are really poorly because the thresholds are quite high. That was really tough, the toughest placement I’ve had, but it was also really valuable.

Then I did a placement with a specialist community team which had a fairly small caseload of people who needed intensive community support over a long period. It was completely different and it was people who were hard to engage with services such as drug users and sex workers.

After that, I put in a request which was approved to go to the eating disorders unit at Leeds. That was really good because I got to see a different trust and how they operate and it’s a really specific specialism.

In final year, I requested to go on a placement with the drug and alcohol team which I loved because it’s another specialist interest of mine. I’m now on a community mental health placement. I've actually found it a lot busier than I have been on a ward because it’s all on you. 

It’s not like a normal degree. We don’t get a really long summer holiday, we don’t get a month off at Easter and Christmas.

I think the curriculum now has three placements in years one and two, where we just had two, but it was the same amount of time (spent on placement). When I first came to University, most of the lectures were spent between all the Nursing fields so it was Adult, Mental Health and Child. There’s more of a focus on anatomy, physiology, biology and really basic Nursing in Year one.

It was quite difficult because a lot of the time it felt that we were going to sessions that didn’t feel so relevant and it felt like it was all about Adult Nursing and that was quite a challenge. In hindsight, it’s good to have that level of knowledge of the body because of the medications we work with and the type of people we work with.

In years two and three, there’s been more time within the actual field. We’re a smaller group so it’s more intimate but it’s nicer to have somebody that’s a specialist from an area that you’re interested in. We share stories and reflections and there’s a lot of wellbeing and clinical support.

I’ve looked into loads and loads of different areas. Mental Health is enormous, you don’t just have to go into acute nursing, there’s loads of specialisms. 

There are eating disorders, drug and alcohol, dementia, CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services), forensic nursing, there’s so much.

I got really overwhelmed earlier on in the year and I was looking at all these different options and thought 'I’m really lucky, it’s really great to have loads of choice', but at the same time I found it really overwhelming.

I’m now going to go and be a prison nurse in a mental health team. That will involve some primary care work including lower level mental health conditions that you might see in your GP practice but also severe and enduring mental illness when people are acutely unwell. There’s a lot of substance misuse and there’s a lot of neurodiversity, things like ADHD and Autism.

It’s a challenging environment with lot’s of challenging behaviours. It’s a really good starting point for understanding risk, medications, behaviours and illnesses all in one place, so I’m going for prison nursing.