A busy couple of weeks!

We've been around and about the last couple of weeks since our launch. Hopefully you will seen some of the press from the event, we're in Nursing Standard, the Bulletin, Activate and all over the RCN website!

We had a couple of days with Canterbury Christ Church University, one at their Medway campus and the second in Canterbury. We saw just just over 200 of their students which was fantastic!

Since then the bus has had some work done, we found that the movement and vibration of the bus was opening the upstairs windows so the rain was getting in! We also had one cupboard with a lock but no side wall...

We've been in London most of this week, St Georges, Kingston Hill and now St Thomas' Hospital where we've met some lovely students on placement and HCAs who are interested in what the RCN can offer them.

We've found a lot of students, even ones in their third year, that don't know that the RCN has a library! And the biggest nursing library in Europe for that matter, so we've been using the cyber cafe quite a bit to talk people through how to request and renew books, do literature searches and contact our librarians online.

We have had a lot of queries about the recent announcement that from 2013, nursing will be come a degree-entry profession. Diploma students are hearing rumours that they will have to get a degree in order to continue nursing and we've had some students on board who have been quite upset at the prespect of this. It is absolutely not true that any nurse qualified before 2013 will need to complete a degree in order to stay in practice. With or without a degree you are qualified as a nurse and this is what counts.

The NMC have some really useful FAQs about the changes and you can find these on the student area of the RCN website: www.rcn.org.uk/development/students

We've had some new bookings for the second part of our tour - we're now visiting students at the University of Nottingham's Lincoln site in February and we're holding a provisional date for their Nottingham site.

We can't believe we're already in the third week of our first bus tour, it will probably be over before we know it! We're having so much fun meeting existing members and new ones!

Over and out.