Nurse

On a nurse apprenticeship course, you’ll help give care, advice and support to sick, injured or disabled people.

A career as a registered nurse is exciting and varied, with opportunities to work in several settings. As a nurse, you will need to engage with a diverse range of service consumers, families, carers, health and care professionals, and other organisations.

You’ll work at a hospital, a person’s home, the community, social care, or public health. Registered nurses are essential in multidisciplinary teams that meet patients’ and service users’ health and care needs. In addition, you will be at the centre of interdisciplinary teams that may include other health and social care professionals.

The nurse apprenticeship programme offers foundational skills and knowledge for all nursing students and specialisations in adult nursing, paediatric nursing, mental health, and learning disabilities. You will be given a nursing degree after you have completed your apprenticeship.

What you’ll learn

On a nurse apprenticeship course, you’ll learn to:

• Use resilience and emotional intelligence, and be able to explain the thinking that influences judgments and decisions in routine, complex, and challenging situations.
• Accept responsibility for continuous self-reflection and seeking and responding to help and criticism to improve their professional knowledge and skills.
• Demonstrate evidence-based practice in all skills and procedures required for safe registration.
• Act as an ambassador, promoting public confidence in nursing, health, and care services and maintaining their profession’s reputation.
• Establish, manage, and maintain appropriate relationships with people, their families, carers, and colleagues.
• Provide and promote non-discriminatory, person-centred, and sensitive care, considering people’s values and beliefs, diverse origins, cultural characteristics, language requirements, needs, and preferences, and any need for adjustments.
• Use the ideas of health promotion, protection, improvement, and disease prevention while dealing with people.
• Utilise all relevant opportunities, making appropriate adjustments as required, to address the impact of smoking, drug and alcohol use, sexual behaviours, diet, and exercise on mental, physical, and behavioural health and well-being in people’s circumstances.
• Improve mental, physical, behavioural, and other health outcomes by understanding and sharing health screening programme concepts, practises, and evidence-based.
• Use innovative behaviour modification techniques to enable people to use their skills and knowledge to make informed choices about their health and lifestyle improvements.
• Use communication skills and strength-based techniques to help people make educated choices about their care to manage health issues and live happy and complete lives within the constraints of reduced capability, sickness, and disability.
• Provide information in simple forms to help people understand and decide about their health, life choices, illness, and treatment.
• Promote and prevent illness through understanding and conveying the principles of pathophysiology, immunology, and the evidence basis for immunisation, vaccination, and herd immunity.
• Protect your health by understanding and applying infection prevention and control principles, including communicable illness surveillance, antibiotic stewardship, and resistance.
• Process the information gathered throughout the assessment process correctly to determine the needs for individualised nursing care and develop person-centred evidence-based plans for nursing interventions with agreed-upon goals.
• Assess a person’s capacity to decide about their care and successfully give or withhold permission.
• Recognise and assess people at risk of harm, as well as the situations that may put them at risk, and take immediate action to safeguard those who are vulnerable.
• Demonstrate the information, skills, and abilities required to recognise and assess people exhibiting signs of self-harm and/or suicidal ideation.
• Regularly conduct investigations, analysing and distributing findings as required.
• Identify and assess people’s and families’ end-of-life care requirements, including the need for palliative care and decision-making regarding their treatment and care options.
• Collaborate with people, families, and caregivers to continuously monitor, analyse, and evaluate the effectiveness of all agreed-upon nursing care plans and services, sharing decision-making and readjusting agreed-upon goals, and documenting progress and decisions made.
• Support people are suffering from common mental health, behavioural, cognitive, or learning problems, and act as a role model for others in providing high-quality nursing care to suit people’s needs.
• Support persons with commonly encountered physical health issues, medication usage and treatments, and act as a role model for others while addressing people’s needs via high-quality nursing interventions.
• Serve as a role model for others by providing evidence-based nursing care to individuals with nutritional, hydration, bladder, or bowel health needs.
• Provide evidence-based, person-centred nursing care to people with mobility, hygiene, dental care, wound care, and skin integrity needs to serve as a role model for others.
• Identify and execute therapies to help people suffering typical symptoms, including anxiety, confusion, discomfort, and pain.
• Prioritise what is important to people and their families while providing evidence-based person-centred nursing care at the end of life, including care for the dying, relatives, the deceased, and the mourning.
• Respond to signs of deterioration or discomfort in mental, physical, cognitive, and behavioural health in a proactive and timely way, and use this knowledge to make informed treatment decisions.
• Manage commonly encountered devices and confidently carry out related nursing procedures to meet the needs of people requiring evidence-based, person-centred care.
• Maintain the safety of work and care environments.
• Comply with local and national risk assessment, management, reporting frameworks, regulations, and norms, and take action.
• Recognise public safety and care quality risks and escalate concerns as necessary.
• Conduct accurate risk assessments in various care settings, using several contemporary assessments and improvement techniques.
• Recognise the need for change and respond quickly to any hazards that may jeopardise people’s safety.
• Participate in all stages of the auditing process and create strategies for quality improvement.
• Utilise the findings of service delivery assessments and audits to promote continuous improvement.
• Share your thoughts and lessons from successful outcomes and experiences, as well as mistakes and bad outcomes and experiences.
• Make it simpler for those who are vulnerable or have a disability to obtain healthcare.
• Identify and manage risks as needed, and take proactive measures to improve the quality of treatment and services.
• Lead and manage the nursing care of a group of people safely and effectively, demonstrating proper prioritisation, delegation, and assignment of care responsibilities to those involved in care delivery.
• Monitor and evaluate the quality of care other team members and lay caregivers give.
• Assist and monitor students as they deliver nursing care, promoting reflection and constructive criticism while evaluating and documenting their performance.
• Challenge and offer feedback on other team members’ care and help them recognise and agree on individual learning needs.

Entry requirements

You’ll usually need:

• 4 or 5 GCSEs at grades 9 to 4 (A* to C) and A levels, or equivalent, for a degree apprenticeship.
  
• Apprentices without level 2 English and maths will need to achieve this before taking the end-point assessment.

Assessment methods

The End Point Assessment comprises two distinct assessment methods: 

• Exams
• Written Assignments

Restrictions and requirements

You’ll need to:

• Pass enhanced background checks

Duration, level, subjects and potential salary upon completion

Apprenticeship standard

More information about the Level 6 Nurse Apprenticeship standard can be found here.

Apprenticeship end point assessment

For more information about the End Point Assessment Process, please read the Institute of Apprenticeships’ information page.