Overview

The BSc Mental Health Nursing course is intended specifically to prepare you for a rewarding career where you can support people with their mental health.

This course is designed to help equip you with the hands-on clinical and care skills to prepare you to practise autonomously and compassionately, providing person-centred and compassionate care and support for service users to be physically safe and emotionally secure. A key element of this course is that all your placements will be relevant to mental health, we do not use ‘generic’ placements.

Ranked 4th for Nursing and Midwifery in The Guardian University Guide 2020, Coventry offers a Clinical Skills Centre with up-to-date equipment and simulators. This course benefits from the high levels of student satisfaction – 97% overall in the National Student Survey (NSS 2019).

Course information

This course aims to develop your knowledge of mental health, various disorders and innovative nursing care approaches. It is designed to equip you with the knowledge and competence to understand the experiences of people with mental health problems and to assist and facilitate their journey to recovery.

You will gain hands-on experience with real service users under supervision from qualified practitioners, spending 50% of your time on clinical practice placements in a range of healthcare environments within the NHS in hospitals and community placements, at private hospitals and independent care providers.

As nursing students are increasingly required to work towards becoming autonomous practitioners, you will be supported in taking a leadership role in decisions regarding patient care within multi-professional settings. You will routinely have frequent and intense contact with patients and will be trained to be competent in recognising changes in patient condition so that appropriate action can be taken.

This curriculum has been developed as a spiral curriculum with assessment at its core. A spiral curriculum is when the same topics are studied throughout the duration of study but each time they are encountered they increase in complexity and reinforce previous learning. Placing equal value on practice and theory, undertaking 800 hours of both per year, you should study a wide range of subjects, including anatomy and physiology, pharmacology, psychology, sociology and research methods. You’ll become immersed in learning about the needs of populations, individuals, related health and nursing services with an emphasis on using research to enhance and improve services.

The collaborative curriculum, which you’ll study alongside students from our other health-related courses, has been developed in response to the need to produce professionals who are effective communicators, caring and compassionate, with good relationship building skills. It recognises the importance of inter-professional working within the health and social care workforce and comprises five core modules in the areas of: the foundations of communication and professionalism; the social determinants of health and wellbeing; evidence informed practice and decision making; working together to lead service improvement; and enhancing practice through evaluation and research.