I am a nurse lecturer with HSC hons in health care management, a MA in Healthcare Education and a Doctorate in Education. I have a wide experience of clinical nursing and education. 

As a registered nurse i specialised in cardiothoracic nursing and predominately worked in surgery in Specialist London hospitals. I also worked in bowel and general surgery and as a senior manager in a cardiology unit. 

Teaching

I am an experienced nurse lecturer teaching in different aspects of the undergraduate curriculum. My interests of teaching include practical skills and simulation. I have experience of developing and implementing new curriculums and the subsequent modules from this. I have led a variety of nursing modules developing initiative classes that can be delivered either virtually or face to face. I consecutively achieve high teaching evaluations.

Leadership

I have vast leadership experience both clinically and in the education setting. My clinical leadership included being ward manger and then a senior nurse manger responsible for a cardiology unit consisting of 50 beds. 

In education I have demonstrated leadership by taking the positions of year lead, which involved being responsible for developing timetables, introduction of new curriculums and coordinating 15 members of the teaching team. Within this role I had the responsibility of guiding and supporting over 450 students nurses a year through the 2nd yr of their program. 

Further positions of leadership include academic lead for clinical practice which entails being a key person between practice partners of the trusts in NI and the AEI. It further entails working closely with the practice allocation team in allocating clinical placements to students. During the Covid 19 pandemic I lead the team for practice aspects of the NMC emergency standards and we enabled all our 3rd yrs students (450) to get a clinical placement during the very challenging times. I gave support and guidance to all of the students to enable them to make an informed decision to go out to clinical practice. 

During this role I represented QUB at regional partnership working groups to develop and implement the Future Nurse NMC standards. One of the working parties developed the regional electronic practice assessment document. I led the practice element for the NMC validation in which we achieved a commendation.

Research

My research interests include the use of Blended learning and the use of Interactive computer assisted learning packages, in which I undertook my Doctoral research in. I am part of research team looking at the impact on 3rd yr nursing students who were deployed into clinical practice and the impact on them as newly qualified nurses. I am also part of a team working with secondary education careers teachers in developing a video teaching package to promote nursing to young people with a view of encouraging more males into nursing. 

My research interests are student learning especially in relation to nursing clinical skills, blended learning and technology.

I have completed my Educational Doctorate thesis in which I undertook 2 primary research studies exploring blended learning and clinical skills. Prior to undertaking the research, a computer-based learning asynchronous package was developed by myself and a computer technician. This incorporated interactive learning activities relating to pathophysiology of the brain and the sequencing of the clinical skill, a video exemplar of the skill and a simulation of the clinical skill using an animated patient to undertake the neurological observations and then record on the observation chart.

This computer package was then incorporated into a blended learning teaching  strategy. The aim of this was for the students to complete the package prior to the skills class then during the skills class the students used case studies and peer learning where they simulated the skill on each other with one student being a nurse the other a patient and the other an assessor.

The first study used an RCT approach investigating if there was a difference between knowledge and skill acquisition between 2^nd year nursing students who were taught the clinical skill of neurological observations by instructional face to face method of teaching or ones who used blended learning incorporating a computer based learning package. Data was collected using a MCQ theory test and an OSCE, the results were analysed using SPSS.

The second study used a case study approach using focus groups and thematic analysis to investigate nursing students opinions and perceptions of using blended learning to learn a clinical skill.