Promoting academic resilience through peer support in a new pre-registration nursing programme

Nursing students can experience increased levels of stress while studying for their registration. It is acknowledged that higher education institutions should incorporate mechanisms to try to reduce these stress levels and build up resilience towards the difficult situations students may encounter during their studies. A bespoke method was created within a new part-time 4-year pre-registration nursing programme to support part-time junior (part 1) nursing students by implementing action learning sets within the programme. These sessions were delivered by part-time senior (part 3) nursing students who had already gone through similar experiences. Both the junior and senior students reported that they had gained benefits from this innovation, increasing their confidence and improving their ability to cope with some of the stressors of the programme. Building the resilience of nursing students within this pilot project was positively evaluated and could be developed further into other nursing programmes. This part-time programme was developed to retain nurses in Wales and was aimed at healthcare support workers with prior experience of providing the fundamentals of nursing care within local health boards.