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Elizabeth Haidar reflects on a learning cycle that helped one student practice nurse get to grips with administering the MMR vaccination
For students training to be practice nurses, there are many practical elements of the role that are new, problematic or require further development. This article identifies one of these new areas, the administration of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, and shows clear evidence of achievement of that practice following a learning cycle.
During the early stages of training the practice nurse trainer was giving the MMR vaccine to a child when his mother requested the vaccine be administered separately and refused to consent otherwise. This was the first time during training that the practice nurse was confronted with a controversial issue, such as MMR. The trainer resolved the situation and gained consent.
The trainer explained that immunisation is a procedure which involves counselling and gaining informed consent before administering the vaccination and asked the student to gain knowledge about the measles, mumps and rubella diseases, the MMR vaccine, how to administer it and the national recommendations. A contract between the trainer and student was developed in the form of a learning action plan. The aim was to enable the student to counsel parents, gain informed consent and administer the MMR vaccine. It was felt that preparing a presentation for a group of parents before vaccinating their children would be helpful for the student in achieving her target.
The findings of a study by Chan and Wai-Tong (2000) suggest that contract learning increases students' autonomy and motivation.
The trainer provided support through direct training, discussions and reflections. Time for self-directed learning gave the student sufficient freedom to identify areas of interest and choose resources. The time limit to achieve the action plan objectives was one month.
The self-directed learning started with the student reading around the subject, which is only a small part of the learning process. 'Learning' as defined by The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2006) is knowledge or skills acquired through experience or study or by being taught. Burnard (1988a) described the three forms of gaining knowledge/skills as: propositional (study); experiential (experience); practical (taught); collectively referring to them as 'experiential learning'. Propositional knowledge is the knowledge found from textbooks and...