Unfortunately, student nurses can sometimes experience unique financial difficulties. This is especially true during placement blocks.
This can affect any student, but those more at risk are:
- international students (who are not eligible for the usual student finance, travel claims, or LSF funding)
- some religious students, who may not apply for the Learning Support Fund (bursary) because they think it’s a loan (which are discouraged in some faiths)
- students who haven’t claimed all of the financial support they can, such as means tested grants.
The DMU Student Finance Team can help with all of these.
Travel and food expenses during placements are often the biggest financial pressure on student nurses. Travel claims are available to all students who get the LSF (bursary). However, they need to pay for travel up-front and get reimbursed after the placement. This can cause a cash flow problem. Taxi journeys are not covered, and any mileage less than the usual distance to DMU is also not covered. Students may need to be reminded that they can and should look for season tickets for public transport, rather than paying for individual journeys.
If a student working with you discloses financial difficulties, please give them the following advice:
- Advise the student to contact their personal tutor about it if they haven’t already. The earlier we know, the more we can usually do to help.
- Advise the student to search ‘DMU finance’ or send them the link. Their advice and appointments page is usually the first result. They can book appointments themselves with the finance team on this page to discuss budgeting, optimising their funding, etc: https://www.dmu.ac.uk/current-students/student-support/student-finance/index.aspx
- Any obvious practical advice (looking for season tickets, cheaper car park round the corner, etc) if the staff member can see any potential quick wins. Please note that there is no long-term pastoral support expectation of assessors and supervisors. Only give advice that you are comfortable providing.
The finance team operate on the principle that no student should have to quit the programme because they can’t afford it. This isn’t always possible, but they do have many resources to help. The main reason that our students withdraw for financial reasons is because they didn’t tell us early enough, and we only find out when they reach a crisis point.
If you are concerned for a student nurse’s welfare for any reason, please contact their Academic Assessor (email on the ePAD) and your local practice learning team in the first instance.