Basic clinical skills of nursing students: a comparison between nursing stu-dents', nursing graduates' and lecturers' viewpoints

Abstract

Background: Nursing is a skill oriented discipline. In clinical training, learning process is mainly related to performance. Moreover, developing skills is one of the main goals of clinical training, because it is through frequent practice that one can develop a skill. This study aimed to determine the frequency of practicing basic skills during nursing students' traineeship.

Methods: This was a cross-sectional descriptive analytic study, using two questionnaires, one for students taking a traineeship course and the other for graduated students and professors.

Results: From among seventeen skills studied in this research, the following have not met the expectation of professors and graduated students: subcutaneous injection, blood transfusion, urinary catheterization, nasogastric tube insertion, lavage and enema with the average frequency of 0.06, 1.49, 0.79, 0.80, 0.08 and 0.17, respectively. There was a significant difference between professors' and graduated students' opinions about the frequency of performing skills of muscular injection, serum preparation with ordinary infusion set and micro-infusion set, blood transfusion, dressing, Intake/Output control, oxygen therapy, airway suctioning, gavage, and lavage procedures.

Conclusion: It seems that nurses do not have enough opportunities to practice some of the basic skills and the reason is that during their traineeships in wards the incidence of a need for these skills are few, and usually interns, residents and nursing-students perform these skills together. This should be considered in curriculum planning.

KEY WORDS: Clinical nursing skill, basic nursing skills, nursing student