Today was our first day at Birmingham City University. First we grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel before getting on the bus to head to the college. We had to take one of the city busses, which was a double-decker bus. We sat on the top, which I thought was really interesting. The bus was very different than the ones in pittsburgh, it was much cleaner and quieter. We started at the main city campus of the college, which is where they have engineering, education, and business classes. Compared to the US, the buildings have a lot of natural lighting and colorful decorations all around, making it feel very welcoming and happy. Their schools also emphasize helping their students, having lots of resources for mental health, financial aid, childcare, and more. You can tell just from our initial walkthrough that they really care about their students. One of the things they do is that they offer laptop rentals, where students can borrow laptops for up to the entire school year. We then had a quick conversation about their nursing and education programs compared to ours at Pitt. One thing that stood out to me was that their schooling is only 3 years instead of 4, but for it to be shorter they do not get the long breaks like we do. They immediately start in the hospitals instead of having a year of prerequisite and general education classes. For nursing, they have to specialize before they start school, picking something such as children’s nursing, mental health, adult health, and more. After choosing, they then take classes specific to this field and then after graduation that is the type of unit they will work on. Additionally, they don’t have to take any kind of licensure exam and can work as a nurse right after graduation. If they want to move to the US, then they would have to take the NCLEX, but also take classes where they get clinical experience in every field since that is required to take the exam. The UK doesn’t have lisensure exams for teachers either, they just trust that once you finish school and graduate that you should be prepared.
After walking around the city campus, we took another bus to the south campus, which is their life sciences building. Here we took a quick tour of their nursing and paramedic skills lab. One of the rooms I was able to look into was set up to resemble an operating room, and it was very realistic. Another room they had was set up like a home, which is used for parametic students since they will need to be able to practice how to enter an unfamiliar area. After a quick tour, we were able to eat lunch in one of their cafeterias. I got mac and cheese and it was really good. They had a decent amount of options but it was a smaller cafeteria and was very different to ours at Pitt. Instead of scanning into a dining hall and getting to eat whatever you’d like how we do, they get in line to pick what they want then checkout at a register.
After lunch, we talked to Chinenye Anetekhai, one of the professors at BCU’s nursing school. She has been a nurse for 17 years where she worked in burn care for most, but also did some time as a midwife. She gave us a lot of insight to being a nursing student from a professors perspective, sharing that your learning is up to you when at your clinical placements. Instead of waiting to be given a task, you should go up to your assigned nurse or clinical instructor and ask to do things, especially if you know of a different patient with a unique illness or treatment that you could learn from. She said it never hurts to ask for the opportunity to try skills or gain more experience, it can only help you with your learning. After talking about nursing school in general, we got into more specifics about how the US and UK are different. One of the biggest things I noticed was that in the UK, there is a bigger emphasis on collaboration between nursing, education, and social work. They are constantly working together to find better ways to do things and how to really help the community. Comparing this to the US, each of those fields is completely separate, barely ever having any overlap.
Then we began talking about burn care. Since Chinenye specialized in burns, she was able to give us a lot of really good information for when we are working as nurses, but also just basic knowledge that everybody should know. One of the biggest things she said was to always cool burns with water for 20 minutes as soon as possible. This method is extremely effective in decreasing the size of the burn, the healing time, and the scarring. After doing this, if the burn is bigger than the size of a coin, she said it is important that you go see a doctor to get it checked out, ensuring it doesn’t need anything else done to it to promote healing. We also learned about the basics of dressings for burns and how they are treated in a hospital settings. I did not realize how debilitating severe burns can be. They can cause severe disability and mental health problems, along with tons of other health side effects as well. Overall it was extremely interesting to learn about and I am excited to go into the hospitals and see more differences between the 2 countries.