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Nursing Students

Background

Universities providing nursing and midwifery education that leads to registration or recording with the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) supply data to NES whenever a student starts, discontinues or completes their course. This includes pre-registration students and registered nurses and midwives undertaking post-registration qualifications.

NES supports the registration process for newly-qualified nurses and midwives in Scotland by transferring data from Turas Indexing to the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC).

Data source

Administrative staff in the Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions directorate (NMAHP) within NES receive data on student completions and commencements throughout the first months of each academic year. Data is uploaded into Turas Indexing by universities using standard spreadsheet templates.

Aggregate data on student intakes are reported back to universities to ensure that NES’ records agree with the those of the data providers. Updates to data, for example, student name changes or notices of discontinuation, can be received at any point throughout the year.

Method

Data are extracted from Turas Indexing in November each year. All students who matriculate onto a nursing or midwifery course within Scotland that leads to a registration with the NMC are included.

What data are published?

NES publish student nurse and midwife intake, in-training, and progression statistics in December each year.

Intake:

  • number of students commencing a course.
  • Number in training: total number of students known to be actively in training on 31st October in each year of the reporting period.

Progression:

The percentage of each student cohort (on three-year degree courses) in each of the following mutually exclusive states:

  • active (if they are in training),
  • inactive (if they are not training and have not completed their course),
  • or complete (if they have completed their training).

Data quality

Turas Indexing has data quality checks built into it, with checks for potential duplicated records and missing or incomplete data. Data quality is monitored throughout the year by NES.

There can be delays in universities notifying NES of students who have discontinued their training, meaning the number of active students may be slightly over reported.

Further information

Intake targets are published by the Scottish Funding Council and measured in full-time equivalents. Cohort sizes are calculated from NES data and measured in headcounts.