In this post, Bethany Easton, Marketing and Communications Administrator for the School of Health in Social Science, highlights the powerful effect of students and staff sharing stories on a blog dedicated to Nursing…

The Nursing Blog was set up in 2014 as a space to share the achievements, research, and work from students and staff across the Nursing Studies subject area. Five years later, it serves the same purpose – as a community blog. We encourage everyone to send in contributions to keep the blog interesting and diverse. Our students and staff have been fantastic at contributing engaging pieces of writing covering everything from teaching, research and events to campaigning.

For instance, lecturer Siobhán O’Connor, who started in Nursing Studies this year, has already contributed a couple of pieces for the blog:

The Nursing Blog is great as it’s a quick and easy way to share what we are doing with the world. Staff and students from across the University and beyond can easily access and read the blogs which provide up to date news on the teaching and research activities we are working on and the impact they have.

Nursing Graduate, Zoe Horseman, is now a Research Assistant and District Nurse. Her professor encouraged her to write for the Nursing Blog:

I think it is very positive that the nursing studies community takes part in so many wonderful things, and it demonstrates the lengths to which a career in nursing might take you – there really is no limit! I wanted to share my experience with other students because I felt it had been such a good learning opportunity.

Our blog also aims to further the Nursing Now campaign, an initiative that was set up to raise the profile of nurses globally: improving health, empowering nurses to improve gender equality – as the vast majority of nurses are still women – and build stronger economies. Students and staff at Edinburgh are getting behind this campaign in many different ways, one example being the coffee rounds our PhD student and alumni attended in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital to raise awareness of the campaign.

As you can see, the motivation for this blog extends further than our internal users: it is aimed at potential students, researchers, nurses and people with an invested interest in health care and the future of nursing. For potential students, the blog offers insight into nursing studies here at the University of Edinburgh.

For us, blogging is one of the ways that we support each other, taking the time to reflect on the hustle and bustle of the everyday, and share our achievements in a blog post. We then we build each other up by pausing to read, appreciating, congratulating and sharing one another’s latest and greatest, biggest or smallest achievements.