We're nearly half way through!

We can't believe we have nearly completed the first six weeks of the RCN Student Bus tour, time flies when you're having fun!!

We've now seen over 1700 students and are currently on our second day at University Campus Suffolk in Ipswich, our first day saw 176 students board the bus so let's see if we can beat that!

We were shocked to find last week that many London based nursing students didn't know about the RCN Library when they are the closest to it, the students here in the Eastern region seem to know a bit more about it which is great, but we've been doing plenty of demonstrations of how to find the online journals and do literature searches.

Our Twitter followers are continuing to go up and we had a student yesterday mention he had been following our pictures on Flickr and Twitter which was great to hear, he was a bit of an expert and advised us to tweet a bit more often which we're now working on!!

We have another three day week next week, visiting the University of Southampton, Buckinghamshire New University and Partnerships in Care site The Dene which we're looking forward to. Plenty of emails are coming through from universities we are visiting in the new year including requests for seminars to be held on our top-deck, we're hoping to encourage a few more universities to allow students some time to come and see us as that is when the seminars work best. Although our Student Advisers can deliver many talks, delivering them in a couple of minutes can sometimes be tough!

The press from the Student Bus launch is all starting to appear, RCN Bulletin, Nursing Standard and the RCN website are featuring it and we had a journalist from local paper the Eastern Daily Press come and see us yesterday so we're hoping to see pictures printed there too.

On quieter days students have time to discuss their issues with us more fully, we have met many with concerns about finances and we've discussed the Department of Health's student cupport consultation quite heavily, some students are also struggling when they are given placements far away from home. We've heard that the jump from the first to the second year can be really tough, and recent figures suggest that this is when most nursing students drop out of their course so we're talking about what support we might be able to offer for you there, if you have any ideas let us know!