Peach, practice, placements and partnership: an initiative to support clinical placements in nursing curricula

This article reports on the formation of an innovative new unit, termed the Clinical Placement Support Unit (CPSU), within a Faculty of Health in a Midlands university. The CPSU is concerned with managing the clinical experiences of the Faculty's health care students and promoting a healthy dialogue between the staff in the Faculty and their clinical colleagues. Several approaches by which a relatively small group of people (the Faculty staff) keep informed a relatively large group of people (the clinical staff within the local NHS Trusts) are detailed. One of the approaches is an assessors newsletter and a second is a website for use by both health care students and the clinical assessors of those students. The main part of the website is an ambitious attempt to help better prepare students prior to their clinical placements and this section of the website is called the Placement Directory. The Placement Directory currently holds details on hundreds of placements where the health care students may be placed. Each web page gives details about a specific clinical placement and has a number of hyperlinks to relevant internet resources.