Clinical hours short of NMC suggestion?

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First of all, I really hope Silverdragon reads this and gives me insight.

I have sent out my application as well as all of my paperwork to the NMC for my nursing license, except my training form. I was trained in the US at an accredited University and received my bachelor degree, which consisted of three full years of nursing training and one year of prerequisites.

I have been working for two years as a theatre nurse.

I passed my IELTS with 9's acrossed the board.

I have had my licensure body fill out the paper and mailed it.

The two references are filled out and mailed.

In other words, I fulfill all the requirements of licensure in the UK thus far.

My concern is: when the dean of my university took my transcripts, she needed to convert the credit hours to actual hours. The clinical hours that she calculated up was in the six hundreds. The NMC suggests approximately two thousand hours for clinical time.

How can there be such a difference?

Will this affect my ability to be licensed in the uk?

I am frustrated that with all of the work and money I've spent on this, that it may not come to fruition. In addition, I am moving to the UK next April regardless of the decision of the NMC, as I will be going on a spousal visa. But I am also aware that there is no more clinical training hours that I could have possibly taken to add up to their suggestion.

Am I missing something?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Heather

Specializes in Medical and general practice now LTC.

yep, can be hard but generally the students are not included in the numbers but work with someone on the ward and can do some other stuff if required. They have to do a few case studies and if the patient is going for further examinations or surgery being extra means they can follow through. The hospitals are also supposed to offer perceptorship and mentorship but that doesn't always work due to short staffing and looking at UK news there is a lot tougher things ahead. One hospital I used to work at has just done some mandatory redundancies and a mixture across the board have lost their jobs including senior nursing staff :(

Specializes in Medical and general practice now LTC.

Also don't get me wrong, the nursing students do get vacation time just not as much as the main university and usually only a couple of weeks at a time

Specializes in NICU.

The other thing that is really cool is that the NHS pays for the education and they can even get a bursary (free money from what I can tell to live on). That helps to compensate the comparatively lower wages.

Specializes in Medical and general practice now LTC.

bursary isn't really enough to live on your own. I remember a single mum with a couple of kids and her bursary wasn't enough even though supposed to be based on a criteria and she worked most weekends to make ends meet. Generally first couple of years students tended to work mon-fri because they didn't get paid. However by final year was expected to start working weekends in preparation to working once qualified

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Hi, I have been an ICU nurse in the US for 4.5 years. I am working on my application to the NMC to get my UK license. I was wondering if anyone can give me the formula to convert my nursing credits into hours so I can help the dean of my school out with converting them. I have a BSN and am just concerned about the hours translating. Thank you

Specializes in NICU.

We can't really help you with the translation. Your dean needs to figure out exactly how many clinical hours you had in each course. Mine was something like 3 hours per week per credit per quarter. It's individual for each school.

Wondering about this as well -- I am currently an LPN, and wish to finish the LPN - ADN/RN through my school. Will the NMC accept that in conjunction with a RN to BSN program? What about an RN to MSN program?

Silverhalide, babyRN, I was wondering about this too. Is there an equivalent position to nurse practitioner in the UK, and would getting a direct entry MSN qualify me to work in the UK in any capacity as a nurse? I'm going to be 29 in two months, just starting my nursing prereqs (posted upthread a few months back - thanks again, babyRN!) and having to go through a regular 4-year degree program for BSN and THEN come back for NP degree sounds onerous, especially when I already have one undergraduate degree under my belt, and would really like to spend my early thirties traveling. Maybe I should just do travel nursing in the US and spend down time in Europe!

Specializes in Medical and general practice now LTC.

The UK does use NP's and a lot regarding work will depend on experience and whether job meets shortage list for the UK. You need to check with the NMS whether direct entry to MSN will be accepted. Things at the moment are really tough in the UK for many professions that work within the NHS especially nurses

Oh, that's excellent to know. Thanks for the heads-up, Silverdragon. I know it's tough all around right now, and that's one thing I'm trying to keep in mind as far as student loans vs. job opportunities go. Last thing I want is a 100k+ pile of loans and no job to show for it.

One question: you said "NMS" in your post; did you mean "NHS," or am I totally clueless here? Thank you again!

Edit: Please ignore my stupid questions, it's what I get for posting on 4 hours of sleep. Thanks for responding!

Specializes in NICU.

Yeah...I would e-mail them directly. Considering that they don't accept accelerated BSNs (even though they have the same number of hours as a "regular" BSN), I don't think they would accept direct-entry as most of them do an accelerated RN license program on the way to getting NP. The exception that I'm thinking of might be midwifery since it seems to be a different type of licensing compared to the US from what I've read.

Yeah, I would think you would do US traveling (although I don't know how good opportunities are for travel NPs; I know NNPs that do it, but I don't know about other specialties) and then go to Europe. Keep in mind that a NP in the UK makes roughly what a RN makes in the US, so you'd be taking a big paycut. The salaries are online and called "band levels" and NPs are generally under "Band 8a" (or at least they are for NNP jobs that I've seen) which start out at about 38,851 pounds = ~$61,000. On the one hand you have your healthcare paid for with lots of vacation time (although I don't know how that kind of scheduling works), but then you essentially have two tax income tiers of 20% and 40% with across the board 17.5% sales tax (you don't "see" it because everything's included in the price). You get a little more money if you live in London, but not enough (IMO) to meet the same standard of living since London is so expensive.

We hope to go in the future (10+ years) after we have kids so they can see grandma and grandpa more than once a year, but I think we'd have to drastically cut our lifestyle...you can't match this kind of experience, though, so we'll see how things turn out.

Hope this helps, some food for thought. Let us know if you decide to pursue it and what your results are: many people read this board even if they don't comment.

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