Clinical placement exchanges for pre-registration nursing students: maximising opportunites

A challenge for both practitioners and educationalists is to provide a rich variety of quality placements to ensure that a student is able to meet the UKCC outcomes required for registration. An innovatory scheme within one education consortium (now work force development confederation) is described an analysed where two universities were able to offer students a placement 'exchange'. This enriched the variety of practice placements available for students, thereby enhancing the learning opportunities for both groups of students. Student issues, which arise in many placements, also arose on the exchange and these will be examined together with the benefits of the exchange.