Commentary: Service user involvement in teaching and learning: student nurse perspectives.

Abstract

It is now commonplace to involve service users as partners in healthcare, including designing health services, co-producing research studies and teaching undergraduate students. This is vital to ensure that services and research studies reflect the experiences and preferences of patients and their families. As a preregistration student nurse, the sessions I remember most keenly are those that evolved around the experiences of patients and their families, particularly when patients participated in classroom sessions. This interesting paper evaluates an initiative at a UK university, where service users were involved in teaching undergraduate nursing students, using a coaching approach. Their Patient as Coach Team (PaCT) sessions focused on the English Department of Health’s 6 Cs (2012), with service users leading a discussion around their experience of healthcare. The evaluation involved a structured survey completed by 321 student nurses, with 170 respondents also completing free-text comment boxes. While this study was single-centre, there was a large sample and both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. The evaluation identified that students felt overwhelmingly positive about the PaCT initiative, with 98% of students reporting satisfaction with the sessions. Crucially, 99% of students either agreed or strongly agreed that they would apply their learning to their future practice, although whether students went on to do so is not included in the paper. The authors generated five themes from the free-text data: that the initiative would be beneficial to their future