Accommodation for students with NHS placements

Your learning will predominantly be based at our Lansdowne Campus (though Talbot campus is also utilised), or our Yeovil Campus for some of our Adult Nursing students, or Portsmouth campus for some of our Midwifery students.

However, clinical placements will be organised by locality in a variety of places within Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire in order to provide the necessary breadth of experience.

Please note - placement localities are allocated at the time of your offer for your course. You will not be able to change your main placement locality once you start. You will need to consider the realities of placements within the geographical area you have been given and be realistic as to whether this will be manageable and suitable for you – whilst being flexible may in some circumstances increase your chances of success, being unrealistic will lead to challenges.

Although you will be allocated a placement locality, to ensure that you get to experience a range of placement experiences needed for successful course completion, you may be expected to change location for a portion of your placement time.

Our trust locations

Our geographical footprint for placement is vast – covering four counties in the South; Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. This ensures we are able to provide you with a wealth of clinical experience across a variety of areas of the healthcare service, including opportunities to experience placements in both urban and rural communities.

As a result, this will involve travel, in some cases this can be more than 40miles away from Bournemouth, and some travel will be outside normal working hours due to the nature of shift work. You must ensure that you have means to travel to your placement location at unsociable hours and this may require you to use short-term accommodation options in order to participate in your placement. To help you with this, the NHS learning support fund can support you with placement travel expenses and dual accommodation costs if required.

Links to details of the NHS accommodation locations are available on this page.

You will find out your placement locality in your offer letter. In some circumstances (e.g. Clearing), you may expect to receive information about your placement locality within a week of receiving your offer. Once you have this information, you can contact suitable hospital accommodation for availability and application.

Please contact the accommodation office of the hospital accommodation directly if you wish to book. Contact details can be found on each accommodation option’s page.

Please note, if you choose to live in BU accommodation, we are unable to release you from your contract should you book alternative accommodation during your placements. However you may be able to claim back travel expenses and dual accommodation costs that may be incurred during your placements from the NHS. 

*Please note that the spaces at hospital accommodation are very limited and there is no guarantee from BU as booking has to be made directly to the hospital accommodation. 

Paramedic Science students need to consider the length of their accommodation contract and the parking available, as you may need a car for your placement.

You can choose to book in any of the BU accommodation, however we offer specific 46-week accommodation, for paramedic students, in the Student Village and Cranborne House. These can be found by using the ‘attribute’ search on the online accommodation portal when booking your room.

If you book into the Student Village you can apply for an on-campus parking permit. For more information and to book your permit, please contact [email protected].

Cranborne House have some limited parking which can be applied for once you have finalised your booking. Please contact [email protected] for more information. If you are unsuccessful in gaining one of those parking spaces you will need to find private parking either in local streets or multi-storey carparks via BCP council.

There is some off-road and on-road parking around the Unilet properties, however these are only 41-week contracts without any possible extensions. There is minimal off-road parking around some of the halls of residence, otherwise there are local multi-storey carparks via BCP council where annual parking permits can be purchased.

At Bournemouth University, we do not have dedicated accommodation at the Portsmouth campus, therefore Midwifery students will need to book their accommodation in the private sector. Click here to look at a list of private halls of residence in Portsmouth that you contact directly to check for availability.   

All these private halls of residence are signed up to The National Code, which is a government-approved code of standards that requires all private operators to manage and operate the accommodation to a high standard. Find out more about The National Code here.

Alternatively, you can email the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth to find out if they have any availability in their accommodation. Please note, that this is NHS (National Health Service) accommodation, which is not affiliated with Bournemouth University.  

You can also conduct your own search for private rent accommodation using the following postcodes that are in the locality of the hospital: 

PO6 3LY for Queen Alexandra 

PO3 6AD for St Mary’s 

If you are searching for private accommodation then don’t forget to use our useful BU’s HomeFinders Checklist.

BU accommodation options do not have on-site parking. This is why we encourage you to really consider how you will get to and from your hospital placement location while working shift patterns where you may start or finish shifts at varying times of day or night.

The University campus locations do not have dedicated student parking for when you attend timetabled teaching for your course. However the Lansdowne campus has good transport links and timetabled teaching is only during daytime working hours, unlike placement work.

Our Unilet properties, depending on the site location, may have limited parking space. Please contact our accommodation team for further information.

When you need to travel to your placement location from your student accommodation in Bournemouth / Poole, you may be eligible for funding from the NHS Learning Support Fund. You can view the policies on the NHS bursaries website. 

If you choose to live in BU accommodation then ResLifeBU is a programme designed to help you enjoy your time in student accommodation to the fullest. It’s only included the accommodation managed by or in partnership with BU.

Our ResLifeBU Team supports you across three core areas:

• Social, covering a wide range of inclusive activities and events
• Wellbeing, comprising your welfare, health, safety and overall comfort and security
• Skills – from cooking masterclasses to tips on managing your budget

Each accommodation has a friendly Resident Assistant (RA) who lives on site and is a current BU student. Having experienced it themselves, your RA has an understanding of what it’s like to move to a new home when you start at uni. There is also a Welfare Coordinator who is a current member of BU staff and is available for any wellbeing issues you might have whilst in residence. Supporting these roles we have the three ResLifeBU Coordinators, and the three ResLifeBU Officers all dedicated to helping you have the best time in our accommodation. 

£1.50 of your weekly rent goes towards the funding of the programme – but if you make the most of it, you’ll find it’s worth so much more than that.