From the article: "It's just unconscionable that the university is taking these peoples' money and making them pay for a course and they're not getting the proper placement experience," she said. "Some of our students are single mothers or are working and they're organising their lives to go on placement." While the attached article seems to be a hit piece on University of Newcastle and an advertisement for University of Technology, Sydney - the truth is that both schools have the same problem: hospitals are not properly incentivised to train university students in a way that complements their coursework.
At University of Technology, Sydney, clinical placement facilitators have a huge variation in quality - from experienced professors to temporary contract employees hired at the last minute. Some students assigned to paediatric nursing rotations are sent to child day care centers rather than medical facilities since there are insufficient positions available. Students without an Australian accent are subject to abuse by the less professional facilitators. Students are assigned to follow staff nurses who have not been allocated time for training students.
Legally, students are only supposed to perform tasks involving patients when they are being directly supervised. However, students are routinely expected to perform checks of patient vital signs and wash patients without supervision since these are basic skills taught in the first semester. Since the law is routinely broken, the situation should be acknowledged and the law changed or the law should be enforced and programs and attitudes changed. More importantly, clinical experiences should be acknowledged as a vital component of training. There should be better integration with curriculum as well as adjustments to the budget and staffing of teaching hospitals.
Reference article: University of Newcastle nursing school still in turmoil due to placement shortfall and an exodus to UTS.