The School of Nursing grew out of Foresterhill College (est. in 1967) and quickly developed a reputation for academic excellence, underpinned by robust, practical and innovative courses that produce skilled, compassionate and highly professional nurses.

 

In 1996 the college became part of Robert Gordon University and moved into the Ishbel Gordon Building at Garthdee in 2002 (you can take a virtual tour of our building here). Over the next 25 years the school developed its international student exchange programme to become the largest UK provider of nursing and midwifery student exchanges under the Erasmus+ scheme. Then, two years ago, in 2020, the School of Nursing changed its name to the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedic Practice in recognition of the new BSc Paramedic Practice course and an increasing demand for a wider range of courses and new research.  

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The School's reputation has continued to grow in recent years.  We were delighted to be ranked first in Scotland for Health Professions by the Guardian in 2020. The 2021 National Student Survey ranked the School as first in Scotland for student satisfaction in midwifery education and second in Scotland for children’s nursing education. We are also very proud of our status as the first university in Scotland to receive the Unicef Baby Friendly Initiative Gold Award in 2021 and one of only five in the United Kingdom. The Unicef accreditation is recognised as a mark of quality in student midwifery and health visiting programmes and helps ensure that students are well prepared to support mothers and their infants to get the best start in life.  

 

We work in close collaboration with our key stakeholders.  Our programmes of education are co-produced with service users and carers, students and clinical colleagues to ensure they are contemporary, innovative and meet the needs of those receiving care. All of our pre-registration programmes have a significant practice learning component and so we work in partnership with our clinical colleagues to ensure students are afforded an excellent practice learning experience which complements the more theoretical aspects of the programmes.

 

We are not just about education, developing people and research. Of course, they are our core activities, but underpinning them is a realisation that it is how we use them to transform health and social care that makes the crucial difference.  We don’t just acknowledge our geographical location: we actively seek to understand it so that we can help transform health and social care in remote, rural and island communities across north-east and northern Scotland. The reach of our work though goes much further than this as we deliver programmes of education to students from across the world, some studying in Aberdeen, others learning online. Also, our research informs health and social care practice and policy not only in Scotland but in the United Kingdom and internationally.  

You can learn more about the School here and you can see our range of courses here.