School’s Out for Summer!

I am officially done with my Overseas Nursing Program!!!  (Wild cheers from the crowd!)……..Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself.

My Workbook

The reason that we are in Bournemouth in the first place, is because I had to take the Overseas Nursing Program course at Bournemouth University before I could be licensed to practice.  The Nursing and Midwifery Council (the license dispensers) thinks that there are certain things that a UK nurse needs to know about. I learned about those things over the last month.  I had to attend 3 in class days held every other Thursday and complete an independent learning workbook.

I ate, drank and licked that book for the last month. Good Riddance!

The book contained information about: The main cultures represented in the UK, the Code of ethics and practice for nurses, medication calculations, information about the structure of the NHS (National Health System), various government policies that apply to health care, a chance to reflect on and draw comparisons between the US and UK systems, and a partridge in a pear tree.  Sounds interesting doesn’t it?  Well it wasn’t!  That book was 227 pages of mind-dumbing drudgery and earth-shattering boredom…….God that thing was tedious, but it had to be done. The last class was on Thursday June 25th.  We handed in our books and took a short quiz to prove we learned something.  Then it was just a matter of waiting for everything to be graded.  While we were waiting Erica, Ancilla and I went down to the garden to watch Wimbledon on the big TV they had set up just for that event.  It was pretty entertaining.  Got to watch Serena Williams beat the snot out of some other girl. There were a couple of guys that sat down near us half way though the match. After about 15 minutes they started asking when the movie was going to start.  I think they were bummed that it was just going to be tennis.

You have to screw up pretty bad to not pass this class, so it was no surprise that we all did just fine. They gave us our final piece of paperwork to mail to the NMC and now we are just one fee of 109 pounds away from having jobs!  Yippee! Trouble is I still don’t know what to expect.  I know a bunch about polices and procedures but not much about what a normal work day is like. Didn’t really cover that in class…..we will just have to wait to find out.

Now, what to do with my ONP workbook? Suggestions?

Burn Workbook Burn!!!