UoG students deliver primary health care in community as part of Nurses on Tour

University of Gloucestershire nursing students teamed up with GP practice teams to deliver primary health care to communities in the Forest of Dean as part of the ground-breaking Nurses on Tour programme.

The Nurses on Tour bus provides a drop-in facility for people with health concerns to access primary health care teams for a diagnosis of symptoms, possible referral, and support and advice about health promotion, which takes pressure off the wider NHS.

The programme gives trainee nurses, mentored by healthcare professionals, valuable first-hand experience of primary care and supporting people’s health across Gloucestershire.

At Vantage Point Business Village in Mitcheldean, 51 people were given full health checks by a team of nursing students who provided preventative care advice, diagnosed symptoms and identified a number of conditions including high blood pressure, tachycardia and diabetes.

GP practice teams were able to update medical records for those attendees registered with a Forest of Dean GP.

Sarah Rogers, Lead Nurse for Gloucestershire Primary Care Training Hub, who is working to make primary care opportunities more attractive to student nurses, said: “In addition to blood pressure checks, the team offered body mass index (BMI) checks (a tool to estimate the amount of body fat to assess risk factors for certain health conditions) and point of care hba1c testing as part of their diabetes screening.

“Nurses on Tour continues to support student nurses to understand the role of primary care nursing, with some of the first students now working as primary care nurses in our surgeries in Gloucestershire, which is a mark of its success.

“The project continues to expand its work with partners across the health and care system to ensure areas of health inequity and inequality are served.”

Rakhee Aggarwal, Head of the University’s School of Health and Social Care, said: “We’re delighted that our students had the opportunity to work with NHS colleagues on this important initiative and make a tangible difference to the health of members of the community in the Forest of Dean. In alerting patients to medical conditions that they may have been unaware of previously, the value of these types of healthcare activities couldn’t be clearer.

“We’re extremely proud to collaborate with our local NHS partners to improve the health and wellbeing of local communities. It is absolutely fundamental to what we do as a school at the University in developing the health and social care professionals of the future.

“Health support projects benefit not only the local community, importantly they also provide valuable and unique learning opportunities in primary care for our students, mentored fantastically well by Sarah and her NHS colleagues, and show them the wider opportunities available to them when they qualify.”