Small start, big finish: progressing your career with UNISON learning

When she was growing up in her native South Africa, Mel Heitkamp wanted to train as a nurse, but her diminutive stature ruled her out from progressing further at the time. “I volunteered at the local hospital when I was in high school back in South Africa, but I was rejected from further training because they thought I was too small to physically turn a patient on my own,” she recalls. Now, several jobs later, living in South Wales with four children, she is all set to enrol on a Bachelor of Nursing (BN) undergraduate degree course – in no small part thanks to the learning support she has had from UNISON. “I feel like I am coming full circle: I want to study a BN, and nowadays being tiny won’t be a problem!” she says. Mel began studying with The Open University (OU) in 2009 by taking two courses in what was then called the Openings programme (they are now called Access modules). She then enrolled on the distance learning short course Science: Human Genetics and Health Issues, which helped her decide that she wanted to train to become a midwife. “I attended an open day at the University of South Wales on the campus at Glyntaff, where the nursing courses are based, and I found out that one of the routes available was to do the K101 Introduction to Health and Social Care course through the OU,” she says. It was while she was working her way through that OU course in 2014 that a friend suggested she join a Return to Learn course that UNISON was about to start ...
Source: UNISON Health care news - Category: UK Health Authors: Tags: Magazine members' learning Source Type: news