Next steps for student supervision and assessment

In 2018, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) released its updated educational standards that will see the abolition of mentorship as we know it today. Mentorship, in its current guise, will slowly be faded out from September 2019, and mentors will be replaced with practice supervisors and practice assessors (NMC, 2018a-d). This article will ask what this means for our current mentors and how it will affect general practice nurses who may want to get involved in student education. It will also consider pre-registration placements in light of the NHS Long Term Plan (NHS, 2019) and the development of Primary Care Networks (PCNs).

The NMC are driving these changes and the 2018 standards relinquish some of the rigid controls of the NMC (2008) Standards for Learning in Practice (SLAIP), placing the development of pre-registration programmes securely with the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and placement providers. Key to the 2018 Releasing Professionalism standards are four documents (NMC 2018a; 2018b; 2018c; 2018d):