Nurse Education in Practice (2009) 9, 81–83

Nurse

www.elsevier.com/nepr

Educationin Practice

EDITORIAL

2nd International Nurse Education Conference –NETNEP 2008 – Research and Innovation inInternational Nurse Education

Welcome to the Nurse Education in Practice SpecialIssue and to a set of papers that reflect the ethos ofthe conference and the aims and scope of thejournal.

Our first ever collaborative NETNEP Confer-ence took place in Vancouver in 2006 and itssuccess across so many different dimensionswas astounding. Based on this positive experi-ence and using the same collaborative model,we were very pleased to work with our col-leagues in the four Dublin Universities and theUniversity of Salford where both journal editorsare based.

To ensure that the same high standard of pa-pers was accepted for both oral and poster pre-sentations we set up an international scientificcommittee, chaired by Professor Tony Long fromthe University of Salford. Given that over 400 pa-pers had been submitted to the Vancouver confer-ence we had anticipated similar numbers;however this was exceeded and 601 abstractswere sent out to review. Making final decisionswas not easy as the overall quality was excellent.Unfortunately, many had to be disappointed butthose which were accepted reflected the overallthemes of the conference and the aims and scopeof both journals. These themes were: Educationin clinical practice, teaching and assessment inpractice, research methodology in nursing educa-tion, technology in health and social care educa-tion, interprofessional education and history,policy and theory in education. (Details of fullprogramme and the conference can be found athttp://www.netnep-conference.elsevier.com). Togive readers an indication of the internationality

1471-5953/$ - see front matter �c 2009 Elsevier Ltd All rights reservedoi:10.1016/j.nepr.2009.01.014

of the conference, there were 400 delegates from32 countries, with many colleagues from Austra-lia, USA, Canada, Norway, UK and Ireland as wellas those from countries such as Nigeria, Bahrain,Poland, Thailand, China, Japan, Turkey andRwanda.

A special focus of NETNEP 2008 was the studentprogramme, organised by Professor Sian Maslin-Prothero, Associate Editor for Nurse Education To-day and Meabh Prendergast, a third year studentnurse from Trinity College Dublin. This was opento all students who attended the conferenceincluding the six students who had been successfulin obtaining (through open competition) an Else-vier award to attend the conference. These stu-dents came from the UK, Kenya, Ireland, Rwandaand Canada. A personal reflection on the confer-ence by one of the students, Simon Tierney-Wiggis published in this issue as a Guest editorial.The success of this sponsorship and the evalua-tions of the students have enabled us to ensurethat we are able to develop the student pro-gramme further at NETNEP 2010 and again inviteapplications for sponsored student places (seethe conference website for continually updatedinformation about the programme and how toapply).

Attempting to capture the whole conferenceexperience is an impossible task in an editorial.However, in my view the conference was yet againa very stimulating, lively and thought provokingexperience for delegates, and the social and pro-fessional networking carried on beyond the end ofeach day. The conference dinner held at theGuinness Storehouse certainly added to the ‘Irish’

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82 K. Holland

experience, and the international delegates alsoenjoyed the wonderful hospitality and history ofthe people of Dublin.

The three key note papers were exceptionalin both their content and their messages. Pro-fessor Cecily Begley (Trinity College Dublin) pre-sented a paper entitled: Inter-professionallearning: tactics, teamwork and talk; ProfessorWendy Hall (University of British Columbia, Van-couver) presented a paper entitled: Whithernursing education: possibilities, panaceas, prob-lems (both these papers can be seen in SpecialIssue of Nurse Education Today) and ProfessorJudith Parker (Victoria University, Australia) pre-sented a paper: Knowledge production andreproduction: What are the implications fornursing practice? This inspirational paper is pub-lished in this Special Issue of Nurse Education inPractice.

The papers accepted for publication in thisSpecial Issue cover a broad range of issues dis-cussed at the conference. They are indicativeof the commitment to nurse education of allwho presented either an oral paper or a posterpresentation.

In brief, Joanne Garside and colleagues fromthe University of Huddersfield, UK, focus their pa-per on student’s choice of assessment methodand offers an alternative approach which buildson the strengths of the student rather than a‘one size fits all’ model of assessment. Kay Bar-rington and Karen Street from the Centre forNursing Studies, Newfoundland, offer an insightinto a new way of using learning contracts andchallenge us to re-fashion some of the more tra-ditional ways of teaching. Sheri Palmer and col-leagues from Brigham Young University, USA,offer an insight into a very innovative, collabora-tive ‘teaching the teacher’ programme in Equa-dor, South America. This is an example of across-cultural development which also highlightedthe issues involved in interpretation of data andlanguage differences in qualitative evaluation.Margaret Bowden and Kay Edgecombe from Flin-ders University, Australia have written a paperwhich is set to encourage debate in relation tofactors impacting on nursing students’ clinicallearning development and progression to profi-cient novice RN’s, and offer a model for us toconsider in relation to this journey. Bonnie LynGarner and colleagues from Western CarolinaUniversity, USA also offer an insight into a con-cept model which encourages and promotes glo-bal nurse education partnerships in developingnurse leaders. Sandra Carter, also from the Cen-tre for Nursing Studies, Newfoundland, Canada

illustrates the importance of reflection on teach-ing and most importantly the development ofexcellence in teaching practice through the schol-arship of teaching.

Julie Isaacson and Annette Stacey fromArkansas State University discuss the use of rub-rics in grading students’ work, in particular wherethis grading varies between assessors and use theterm ‘objectifying the subjective experience’ toillustrate the need for clearer grading for clinicalpractice assessments. The final paper by CarolSternberger and colleagues from the Indiana–Purdue University, Fort Wayne, USA focuses onthe use of technology in nurse education, in par-ticular nursing informatics and high fidelity pa-tient simulations. They stress the need for thenew technologies to be integrated into nurseeducation but recognise the cost implication forsome of these as well as the need for staffdevelopment.

The message for me as editor arising from thesepapers is the continued innovation and develop-ment of nurse education in different countries ofthe world which have global implications for the fu-ture of our practice as educators. The recentdevelopment of the Global Alliance for NursingEducation and Scholarship (GANES) by a numberof international nurse education organisations(Daly et al., 2008) is surely an indication of theneed to continue to share good practice in nurseeducation and scholarship, in particular as it im-pacts on the practice of nursing and the role ofthe nurse. Their focus however appears to be ‘aforum for nursing education leaders to collaboratein and share nursing knowledge and best practices,learn from one another, and work as an interna-tional group to influence policy and health care inrespective countries’. It is hoped that nurse educa-tors world-wide will have an opportunity for a voicein this kind of development, for surely we all have astake in the future of nurse education, both itsdelivery and its development depend on the activ-ities of nurse educators in academic and practicecontexts.

Our next conference is in Sydney, Australia, inApril 2010 and will continue to support the devel-opment of a global dialogue on nursing educationand the research and scholarship of educationpractice.

Reference

Daly, J., Macleod Clark, J., Lancaster, J., Orchard, C.,Bednash, G., 2008. International Journal of Nursing Studies45 (8), 1115–1117.

Editorial 83

Karen HollandEditor

Nurse Education in Practice,University of Salford,

Salford Centre for Nursing,Midwifery and Collaborative

Research School of Nursing, UK

Available online at www.sci

Tel.: +44 161 2952765E-mail address: k.holland@salford.ac.uk

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