reason than historical accident or the local availability of academics from other
disciplines.
But, as has already been observed, nursing is a practice-based discipline and arguably
the nurse teachers with the most influence on students of nursing are the practitioners
themselves. Indeed, it is a requirement made explicit in the statement “You have a duty
to facilitate students of nursing .. .and others to develop their competence” (NMC 2004b
clause 6.4) that appears in recent editions of the NMC code of professional conduct,
although the extent to which this injunction has settled into the general consciousness of
the working population of nurses themselves remains to be seen. For it is the case that
the traditional division between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ remains and provides one of the
recognised stressors of pre-registration nursing students as they try to negotiate
appropriate ‘student’ type behaviour in each of these two very different learning
environments when moving between the academy and clinical placements.
It seems, then, that there are three broad categories of nurse teachers, each with a
slightly different primary function. The first group can be distinguished as those whose
primary function lies in the delivery of nursing care to patients, and although these
practitioners of nursing have a professional obligation to enable students to leam, few
will understand this as a primary or even a priority task in the face of the competing
demands of proving safe and effective care. The second group of nurse teachers are
usually registered nurses employed specifically in educational roles within clinically
facing organisations (hospitals, trusts and so on) to operationalise or develop an
educational policy for the institution. Such roles develop in different ways in different
trusts and some have specific responsibility for the educational and training needs of
nurses and student nurses, others have a much wider institutional role. The third group
of nurse teachers are those who are employed in institutions of higher education as
teachers of nursing or other specific subjects relevant to the education of nurses.
The terms mentor, practice educator, and lecturer have been identified as appropriate
for registered nurses who fall within the first, second and third of these groups of nurse
teachers respectively (ENB and DH 2001) and henceforth I shall use these terms to
differentiate between the three groups. I will continue to use nurse teacher as an
umbrella term to indicate those included in all three groups. Thus if Ryle is correct in
that our teachers of morality are those whom we admire and attempt to emulate then it
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