Maintain pressure on reforms to protect NHSStudent nurses must be taught to be entrepreneurs and innovators
Nurses should be taught entrepreneurial skills in both pre-registration and post-registration education and training, according to the Prime Minister’s Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery.
The commission’s final report, Front Line Care, notes that the nursing profession is often already working in new ways in response to patients’ needs.
But it adds: “Radical shifts in service delivery and philosophy, including the entrepreneurial spirit of social enterprise, provide important opportunities to increase their impact.
“More support is needed to help nurses and midwives encourage and embed innovation, including workplace cultures that stimulate new ideas and enable them to champion and deliver high quality, compassionate care in innovative ways,” the report says.
As well as adding entrepreneurial skills to training and education, the commission says courses should also build in ways to help nurses understand new technologies.
Training and education must “deliver technological understanding and skills for information, communication and practice”, it says.
Additionally, the report calls for transformational teams to be established, which would be led by nursing and midwifery innovation fellows, in order to raise standards and introduce innovation through peer review.
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Readers' comments (4)
Anonymous | 2-Mar-2010 10:16 pm
Do people not realise that Social Entrepreneural organisations are just another way of privatising the health and social services.
I am NOT interested in being one so don't waste your time and money teaching me how to be one. I would ather they FUNDED my clinical updating than me paying for it.
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Anonymous | 3-Mar-2010 8:54 am
I am a third year mental health nurse and our course includes, philosophy, psychology, sociology, as well as nursing subjects. I feel that to be taught entrepreneural skills is just something else that takes students further away from real nursing. The kind that is to care for the patient.
Why dont they make the entrepreneural skills a degree module?
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Philip Darbyshire | 5-Mar-2010 2:36 pm
I think if you read the report a bit more carefully you'll see that this is a recommendation that will make sense to everyone.
How many times as a student or clinician have you seen something that 'doesn't work' or could be done better?
How many times have you had a good idea that could improve care or services but have had no idea what to do with it?
How many times have you complained that people 'don't listen to nurses'. How often have you complained that everyone else gets to influence services but you?
Entrepreneurial thinking and working is NOT just for 'the private sector'. Why should they enjoy all the advantages?
Don't dismiss this idea out of hand. Think of all of the great things in your life that you enjoy now because of somebody's entrepreneurial thinking.
No reason why we should not want such creative, imaginative thinking in everyday clinical nursing.
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Anonymous | 19-Apr-2010 3:43 pm
Nice comment Phil.
Enough with the Nurses 'must' and Nurses 'Should' please NT. It reflect the authoritarian stentorian and pious past of nursing which does nothing to help us sort out the mess we are in today.
More kowtowing to Whitehall mandarins on their latest 'entrepreneurial nursing drive' is not going to make us entrepreneurial.
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