Concepts in Evaluating Effective Clinical Education: A Qualitative Study of Nursing Students’ Experiences

Improving the quality of clinical nursing education requires continuous review of the current situation to correct weaknesses and students are the best sources to identify clinical education problems, thus this study aims to gain a deeper understanding of students’ views on the problems of effective clinical education.

This qualitative study was conducted by in-depth interviews among nursing students of selected hospitals in Mahabad City, Iran in 2019. Twenty students were selected by purposive sampling. Data were collected through in-depth interviews based on the real experiences of nursing students of learning in a clinical education environment with answers to nine open-ended questions. The qualitative content analysis method was used to analyze the data.

The texts of the extracted interviews were analyzed and conceptual codes were extracted from it, and then the codes were divided into four general concepts and related sub-concepts, which included factors related to the clinical education environment, learners, clients and clinical education instructors.

Nursing education planners and officials can identify these factors with the help of nursing students which can improve the quality of clinical education and develop students' competencies to better care for patients, so that by improving the conditions of clinical learning environments in terms of facilities, empowering educational instructors, increasing students' self-confidence and client-to-student trust, more interest and motivation in students will be created.