The opinions of the lecturers from the Msc of Psychiatry nursing curriculum: a qualitative study

The development of health services in recent years has made it necessary to train nurses especially at the master's level. In so doing, psychiatry nursing was set up in Iran for better nursing care to psychiatric patients and the curriculum was established in the year 2011. In this study, due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation of the adequacy of the new curriculum in this field as an important component, the opinions of educators in the field of psychiatric nursing was solocited.

This qualitative study was performed using Conventional content analysis in the academic year 2018. Participants were 9 psychiatric nursing lecturers with at least 2 semesters of teaching experience from universities across Iran randomly selected to take part in semi-structured oral interviews (30-60 minutes) and continued until data saturation, and open-source codes were extracted by repeated reading of the interviews.

After reviewing the gathered data, 90 primary open codes were extracted, which were divided into 4 categories and 5 sub-categories based on the relationship between the codes. Of these, 25% of the codes were related to the overall structure of the curriculum, 28.7% were related to the educational efficiency, 22.22% were related to the research efficiency and 24.07% of the codes were related to the clinical efficiency of the curriculum.

The results revealed the inefficiency of the curriculum in various aspects of education, research and clinical, which in turn suggests the reevaluation of the program to solve problems based on the views of educators.