Students not always prepared for nursing behind bars: study

In casting a wider net to find clinical placements for nursing students, tertiary institutions have turned to prison health services to guide students on the job, but are undergraduates prepared for the experience?

That's one of the questions researchers unpacked as part of a study, published in Nurse Education in Practice, into how students feel about placement in a prison.

While the majority (89 per cent) of nurses who participated in the study considered the experience effective, some felt psychologically ill-prepared for the physical and emotional aspects of placement.

Nursing Review sat down with lead researcher associate professor Thea van de Mortel, from Griffith University, to discuss what students got out of prison placement, how they felt about the challenges it presented and whether we will be seeing more clinical placements in prison health services in Australia.

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