Effective reflection on clinical competency of nursing students

Objective (s): With the ever-growing increase of knowledge in today’s global society, teachers now feel it is necessary to train students to become reflective thinkers. This issue is particularly important for nursing students who are responsible for taking care of patients.

Forty-two nursing students voluntarily participated in this study. After explaining the aims of the study to the participants, they took part in the clinical skills test. They were divided into two equal case and control groups. The control group took part in routine clinical programs and the cases participated in routine clinical programs plus an interventional program. They were asked to reflect on their clinical experiences for the last 12 weeks of their clinical course and take part in the clinical skills test again. Baseline and post-test data were compared among two groups.

The results confirmed the role of reflection on clinical competency, and the two groups were different with respect to learning clinical skills.

The findings suggest that clinical skills test should be implemented in the nursing curriculum in Iran as one of the necessary criteria for competency