Morven Mitchell

Profile

Biography

Morven is a Registered Nurse (Adult) and a Senior Lecturer in Nurse Education. Morven is a Year of Study Lead for the NUR3000 September Cohorts which is part of Year 3 of the BSc Pre-Registration Nursing Programmes. The Year of Study role is quite varied where you have the responsibility of co-ordinating the smooth running of the student’s timetable, assessments, marking, queries, concerns, and complaints. You attend regular meetings with the Programme Leads so that you can highlight any issues for them to take it to the next in line of the chain of command. You also need to be able to keep the rest of the team informed of any changes which can and do happen at a moments notice due to the fact that this programme is still fairly new and still being refined. Morven’s clinical background includes working starting out as a newly qualified nurse on the Staff Nurse Development Programme where you had six months on a medical ward, six months on a surgical ward and then six months in a specialist area which is were I fell for Intensive Care and I managed to work my way up to a Senior Nurse Position in Critical Care for 16 years. The Critical Care that I worked in had the following areas/types of nursing and you could be allocated to any of these areas when on duty: Intensive Care Nursing, High Dependency Nursing and Coronary Care Nursing. Morven then worked as a Cardiac Rehabilitation Specialist Nurse for 6 years before starting her new career in Higher Education at Edge Hill University.

Research Interests

Areas of Interest: The Role of the Personal Tutor in Nurse Education Programmes and Health Behaviours in Patients with Coronary Artery Disease.

I have recently become a member of the Edge Hill University Cardio Respiratory Research Centre (CRRC) and it is my ambition to make some connections and become an active member in research as that was one of my reasons for changing my career to Higher Education.

Teaching

I am a member of the NUR3000 Team who teach and assess Year 3 BSc Pre-Registration Nursing students- Preparing for the Role of the Registered Nurse.

When I started at Edge Hill University I was involved in the creation of writing the content for Year 3 following the mapping outline and headings that we were provided with. The Learning Episodes that I was responsible for developing are as follows: –

Health Behaviours and Behaviour Change

Accessibility of Information

Developing Improvement Strategies

Commonly Encountered Physical Health Conditions

Knowledge Underpinning First Aid Procedures and Basic Life Support

In my role I am also involved in teaching and facilitating Field Sessions for our students covering a variety of topics other than the ones I have already mentioned.

This role requires you to be knowledgeable in all aspects of Nursing and have the ability to adapt to various different topics as required. I have also taught on other programmes such as the RNDA programme where there are less students so that has given me the experience of teaching large groups in the BSc Nursing 400 + and then the RNDA and 2012 BSc Programme where the numbers have been 25 students. This has provided me with very diferent teaching skills and I have found that very beneficial.

I am Verbal Assessment Lead – this project was given to me after I had been at Edge Hill for three months and having never done something like this before I found it quite daunting at first however, with some support from some senior colleagues it has become a very successful assessment with high pass rate. I have also recieved great feedback from the students, staff and external examiners.

I am a Personal Tutor this is an extremely challeging role due to the number of students we have in our Nursing Programme cohorts you often have a large number of Personal Students assigned to you compared to other disciplines. Although it is often rewarding it can also be very harrowing and draining. It does take up a lot of your time due to the numbers and their complex issues.

I am an Academic Assessor for Year 3 this is a very pressured role at this point as you are signing off students and stating that they are competent and ready to apply for their PIN. It requires thorough attention to detail when reviewing their PAD/PARE Documents and often there is a very tight turnaround to get these signed off- which puts a lot of pressure on the Academic Assessor. 

I am part of the Personal Tutor Development Group- this group was put together to address some urgent issues relating to this role. I have attended meetings in relation to the issues and worked as part of a small team to rectify and find solutions to the main issues that were presented to us and we have already made some great progress. Another part of my role was to arrange for guest speakers to attend the PT Forum which is held once per month. The guest speakers are members from all over the University from different departments that interact with the PT role at different times. This has proved to work well for both the guests and attendees and it is hoped that this will continue.

I am Co-Lead for the Coaching Strategy for the Nursing Department- this involves introducing staff or refreshing staff who are already aware of the tools that can be used in coaching conversations. We have already run these sessions and now we are looking to embed some coaching conversation into the timetabled PT sessions. We have built some pre-prepared sessions for the PT’s to use and we will provide support/training as required before they deliver the session to the students. We have also created a Teams tile/repository so that staff can find resources for coaching more easily. HR have kindly allowed us to use their resources which includes courses and traing that staff can do online- this has all been added to the tile. We will also incude other useful information and posts- we will be launching this very soon.

I am also very lucky to be involved in the LHCH Partnership by supporting the Lead with a couple of the recent projects that are taking place. These are the validation of a Heart failure Module and the validation of an MSc in Cardiothoracic Practice. I am also due to assist with moderation. This is all very exciting to me as is relates to cardiology and I am looking forward to being part of this under the guidance of the Lead and I hope to be an asset to the process.