ABSTRACT
Nursing is a vocation that is practised. The student's experiences in practice – in the clinical setting – are therefore a necessary component of an educational programme for which the eventual culmination is a professionally qualified registered nurse. Accordingly, the United Kingdom Central Council (UKCC) (1999) recommends that practice should have an equal weighting to theory – 50 per cent each. Practice is not something that only starts when nurse education ends, as Creedy et al. (1992) confirmed, but rather it progresses hand in hand with theory throughout the programme.
