Promoting community engagement in a pre-registration nursing programme: a qualitative study of student experiences.

AIMS: To offer child health student nurses a broader learning experience in practice with an autonomous choice of a volunteer placement area. To reflect the changing nature of health care and the move of care closer to home in the placement experience. To evaluate participants' experiences. DESIGN: This study used descriptive and interpretative methods of qualitative data collection. This successive cross-sectional data collection ran from 2017 to 2020. All data were thematically analysed using Braun and Clarke's model. METHODS: Data collection strategies included two focus groups (n=14) and written reflections (n=19). RESULTS: Students identified their increased confidence, development as a professional, wider learning and community engagement. They also appreciated the relief from formal assessment of practice and the chance to focus on the experience. CONCLUSION: Students positively evaluated this experience, reporting a wider understanding of health and wellbeing in the community. Consideration needs to be given to risk assessments in the areas students undertake the placements and the embedding of the experience into the overall curriculum.

The use of autoradiography for investigating the distribution of radioactivity in lung counter calibration sources.

This paper shows that autoradiography is a useful technique for investigating radioactivity distributions in lung phantoms and planar sources. It was applied to a sliced lung phantom that had activity homogeneously distributed throughout the tissue substitute material and to laminated planar sources in an attempt to answer three questions: 1) Was the activity distribution the same in each slice of the sliced homogeneous lung set? 2) Was the activity distribution the same for each of the laminated planar sources? and 3) Were the activity distributions the same between slices and planar sources? The activity distribution, including identification of some locations of elevated activity in the sliced homogeneous lungs, was easily obtained using autoradiography. This study demonstrates that neither the sliced homogeneous lung sets nor the laminated planar sources had a homogeneous distribution of radioactivity, as had been previously thought.