Difficulties Faced by Nursing Students During Clinical Placement, Research Paper Example

Introduction

Nursing students working towards clinical placement often face difficult challenges in identifying an organization that meets their needs and provides them with the resources that are necessary to advance their education in preparation for a permanent career within the field. This process requires an examination of some of the issues that students face, along with any obstacles that may impact selection and placement at this stage. It is important to interview students and obtain information regarding the placement process in order to determine how these challenges impact their eventual placement into a program and the steps that are required to ensure that they achieve the desired level of success through these collaborations. Through the use of a specific instrument, nursing students will be able to identify the challenges that they face and the opportunities that are available to improve this process and how to fully integrate into the clinical placement experience with the desired level of success during the placement experience.

The appropriate placement is essential to the nursing student’s roles and responsibilities to the field and in supporting the nursing experience as a viable opportunity to increase knowledge and better understand the role of this process in improving the nursing student experience (Levett-Jones & Buourgeois, 2010). The clinical placement is an important indicator of the type of experience that the nursing student is likely to have; therefore, this process will be most beneficial when it provides a greater sense of discovery and understanding of nursing practice and how it impacts students’ lives (Dietrich Leurer et.al, 2011). Students require a clinical placement experience that is practical in nature and effective in supporting the student’s focus and direction in pursuing a possible specialty within the field (Dietrich Leurer et.al, 2011). This process will enable students to achieve greater satisfaction with the placement experience and will enable them to ask questions and obtain knowledge that will drive their success and achievement throughout their careers (Lamont et.al, 2014). Satisfaction with the clinical experience is critical to the growth and development of the nursing student; as a result, experiences for future students should be improved, based upon existing feedback to address these conditions (Lamont et.al, 2014). A nursing student’s clinical placement also supports their ability to achieve an environment where anxiety is minimized and students possess a higher level of productivity through this experience (Cheung & Au, 2011). When this experience is not successful, it places an even greater burden on students to make up the lost knowledge through a different experience (Cheung & Au, 2011). These circumstances could be avoided if the clinical placement experience is successful to begin with and provides students with the tools and resources that are required to achieve success in this role (Cheung & Au, 2011).

Methods and Methodology

In order to obtain information regarding a student’s clinical experience, it is important to ask the appropriate questions and address the challenges of this process through a questionnaire instrument, which will identify some of the core strengths and/or weaknesses of the clinical placement and the actual experience. Student satisfaction with the clinical placement is extremely important for the student’s academic performance and wellbeing; therefore, it must be addressed effectively through the questionnaire in order to enable future placement experiences to improve upon visible weaknesses within a program. By using a questionnaire, the researcher is able to identify some of the core issues that must be addressed during the placement process and during the actual experience.

The proposed questionnaire is necessary as a means of obtaining much-needed information regarding clinical placement, including the learning-based and emotional context of the process, as both areas are instrumental in shaping outcomes for students. Furthermore, experiences with lead instructors should also be considered because these have an impact on student perceptions and their beliefs regarding the overall effectiveness of the clinical placement experience as it unfolds. It is necessary to develop a questionnaire that allows for a variety of opinions so that different perspectives of the experience may be obtained and supported by the issues that are most common to students in these examples.

Additional Information

For the proposed questionnaire, a brief turnaround time was required in order to disseminate the questionnaire and obtain the responses from the study participants. It was important to address the primary concerns of the nursing student and his or her perception of the placement process, as this reflects a challenging yet intriguing approach to managing this part of the nursing student process that often requires additional attention and focus. It is likely that some of the most important parts of the experience go unfulfilled, particularly when there are significant issues that go unaddressed by instructors and other experienced nurses working directly with students in the clinical environment. This process requires an astute and effective learning curve; however, this is not always the case and requires further consideration and elaboration because students who get nothing out of the experience may be behind their peers with respect to their own learning and focus. The questionnaire should address the most pertinent questions that directly influence students, as their experiences are likely to be highly diverse; however, their ability to express their opinions is imperative to the process and must be addressed as a key component of the clinical experience in order to achieve greater success for future students who are required to undergo similar experiences as they advance their education accordingly.

References

Cheung, R. Y. M., & Au, T. K. F. (2011). Nursing students’ anxiety and clinical performance. Journal of Nursing Education, 50(5), 286-289.

Dietrich Leurer, M. A., Meagher-Stewart, D., Cohen, B. E., Seaman, P. M., Buhler, S., Granger, M., & Pattullo, H. (2011). Developing guidelines for quality community health nursing clinical placements for baccalaureate nursing students. International journal of nursing education scholarship, 8(1).

Lamont, S., Brunero, S., & Woods, K. P. (2014). Satisfaction with clinical placement–The perspective of nursing students from multiple universities.Collegian.

Levett-Jones, T., & Bourgeois, S. (2010). The clinical placement: An essential guide for nursing students. Elsevier Health Sciences.