OpenLearn Profile

Jan Draper

Jan Draper

Department of Nursing

Professional biography
Professor Jan Draper is the Director of Nursing within the Faculty of Health and Social Care at The Open University. Following a clinical background in adult nursing, I moved into higher education in the late 1980s, supporting students on both pre-and post-qualifying nursing programmes at a range of different academic levels. Over the last ten years this has been predominantly in the field of distance learning, firstly with the RCN Institute and, since 2007, at The Open University. Here, I am responsible for leading the development and delivery of high quality, flexible, work-based learning solutions for the nursing and healthcare workforce. This includes UK-wide education provision for healthcare support workers (including a unique, part-time pre-registration nursing programme by distance learning) and registered nurses. Central to my approach is a desire that all education should, in some way, make an impact on practice and my education and research activity is predicated on this one, central aim. I have experience of a range of research projects under the broad heading of ‘life course transitions’. My early research interest was in the area of maternity services and, in particular, the experience of service users and their representatives. My PhD (1995-2000) developed this interest and used an ethnographic approach to explore men’s experiences of their transition to fatherhood. This prompted an interest in a number of conceptual frameworks including transition theory and the sociology of the body, both of which I have subsequently used in other empirical and writing projects. A second research theme relates to professional work-based learning including student support in practice, the transition to registered practitioner and beyond and, in particular, the impact of learning on practice.