“Do you not want to be with me anymore?”: the emotional toll of placements for single mothers who are undergraduate nursing students

This presentation shares one theme from a broader qualitative study exploring the experiences of working-class single mothers enrolled in undergraduate nursing programmes across Scotland. Drawing on interviews with single mothers currently enrolled in nursing degrees, this presentation focuses on the emotional toll of clinical placement—particularly the prolonged separations from children that mothers are forced to navigate due to inflexible, unpaid rotas. These separations carried significant emotional weight, with some children expressing feelings of abandonment and mothers describing moral injury, guilt and exhaustion. Using concepts of respectability and symbolic violence, the analysis highlights how maternal care is rendered invisible within nurse education. Rather than being supported, these women must constantly perform competence and compliance, even at great personal and familial cost. These preliminary findings speak to current policy debates on child poverty, widening access, women's health and the future of the nursing workforce—offering insight into how caregiving responsibilities could be better recognised across education and healthcare policy.