Clinical Areas as Learning Environments for Student Nurses

In January 1989 a working group, made up of college and service staff, was formed with the remit of devising a method of assessing the suitability of a clinical area for student nurses to learn the practice of nursing. The group interpreted the remit as the identification of the quality of the learning environment offered by clinical areas. Other UK nursing colleges had devised methods of assessing the quality of learning environments but the working group felt that those studied were too subjective. The group felt that responses to quality matters which were in the form of statements were too difficult to compare and therefore to use as standard‐setting tools. By means of questionnaires, grading forms and direct observation numerical scores were applied to each factor, giving the possibility of setting numerical standards. A pilot study was undertaken which showed the method to be a feasible approach to measuring quality, although some of the measuring methods used require to be refined and the pilot repeated several times to give values to the figures attained.