Alison Cole proposes that nursing students in A&E should have a prescribed role that facilitates reflective practice

In many A&E units, patient care is divided between acute, minor and resuscitation cases. The content of this paper was generated in response to a specific incident in which I mentored a student in the acute cubicle’s area. The incident suggested that this area was a poor learning environment, an assumption that was further supported by qualitative data from six other students, and parallels in clinical education literature. Building upon suggestions in relevant literature, this paper proposes a new ‘supervised named nurse’ model of learning for this area that responds to the identified deficits (see Table 1).