Children's Nursing

Highlights

Receive full tuition fee support from NHS Wales plus £1,000 towards living costs when you commit to working in Wales for two years after graduation. Additional financial incentives are available for those who choose to study through the medium of Welsh, strengthening care in our communities. A 50/50 balance of academic study and clinical placements ensures you gain hands-on experience alongside your learning, putting theory into practice from the start of your degree.

Develop your skills in a wide range of environments - from children’s hospitals and paediatric intensive care to community services, hospices, special care baby units, and child mental health settings - preparing you for the realities of modern children’s nursing. Be taught and supported by experienced registered nurses and leading academics, bringing research-led insight and real clinical expertise into your learning, and ensuring child- and family-centred care is always at the heart of your training. Learn and practise in our state-of-the-art clinical skills and simulation facilities, including mock hospital wards, community flats, high-fidelity manikins and advanced VR, giving you confidence before stepping into professional settings.

Course overview

Being a children and young people’s nurse - or paediatric nurse, is a rewarding role which requires compassion, patience and versatility. Children’s nurses provide high quality, evidence-informed care for children experiencing a wide range of physical, emotional and mental health conditions and disabilities. They care for babies and children of all ages, providing support for their families and the teams involved with the child.

Validated by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), our Bachelor of Nursing (BN) Child Field prepares you to become professional, caring, compassionate, skilled and competent nurse, who prioritises patient needs and delivers individualised nursing care to achieve the best health outcomes. The course blends wide-ranging clinical placements* with research based theory and supported clinical skills training featuring virtual technologies, including a family of clinical manikins, which enable you to practise skills in a supported environment. Children's nursing care extends from birth to the age of 18, and sometimes older where the child is living with a complex medical health need or disability.

Children’s nurses are taught to recognise the healthy and the ill or injured child. They deliver expert care for children of all abilities and uphold the rights of the child to be kept safe and secure, free from harm in all clinical settings. They work with the children themselves, their families and multiagency teams to build trust and to provide the highest quality care and patient experience for the baby, child or young person.

Effective communication skills are key to the child being listened to and understood. Children may have speech and language needs, or difficulties with learning and understanding, and may be unable to speak or communicate their needs. Children’s nurses are also taught how to work closely with family members and carers to reduce the impact of being ill, or in hospital, and who often experience difficult or stressful circumstances.

In addition to communication skills, you will be taught a range of other essential skills on this degree. Monitoring new-born babies to ensure that they are safely cared for, for example, or organising blood tests for a toddler diagnosed with diabetes. You will learn to apply wound dressings to an injured child, or reassure a teenager who has received difficult news and a worrying diagnosis.

Spending half of your time on placement, designated placement supervisors and assessors will support you to develop your clinical knowledge and skills. You are encouraged to reflect on what you have learned in clinical practice with enthusiastic and experienced staff, who have wide experience across clinical specialisms and have…