Reference no: EM133343838

Case Study:

The Real World: Lived Experiences of Student Nurses during Clinical Practice

The participants in the study conducted by Tiwaken et. al. (2015) considered clinical practice to be an essential component of their learning process. The integration of both theory and practice and opportunities for application and laboratory skills enable student nurses to learn effectively, to feel confident with their skills, and to become competent in taking care of patients. Meanwhile, problems and concerns may be addressed better if good interpersonal relations and sustained communication are practiced. Findings suggest that there is a need to rethink the clinical skills training in the field of nursing. Distinctly, approaches in order to decrease the gap that exists between the academic and the clinical component of nursing education should be explored, clinical instructors on the other hand need to design strategies and new innovative ways for more effective clinical teaching. Finally, there is a necessity to use approaches that facilitate learning in clinical practice beyond creating a conducive clinical learning environment.

A qualitative study of nursing student experiences of clinical practice

Sharif and Masoumi (2005) investigated student nurses' clinical practice experiences. Clinical practice has always been an important part of nursing education as it trains student nurses to be capable of both "doing" and "knowing" clinical principles in practice and encourages students to use their critical thinking skills to solve problems (Dunn & Burnett (1995), as cited in Sharif & Masoumi (2005)). Data was collected from 90 baccalaureate nursing students, in nine groups of ten students, at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. The findings revealed four themes that the students considered important in their clinical experiences. The four themes were "initial clinical anxiety", "theory-practice gap", "clinical supervision", and "professional role". The majority of the students were anxious at the start of their clinical placement, felt there was a lack of integration of theory into clinical practice, felt their instructors had more of an evaluative role than a teaching role, and felt that there was an unclear line between what they had learned in the faculty and what was expected of them in practice. Nursing students were dissatisfied with the clinical component of their education, according to the study's findings. They were anxious because they felt incompetent and lacked the professional nursing skills and knowledge needed to care for a wide range of patients in the clinical setting.

Question: What can be the best synthesis for this study?