Nursing Student's Clinical Learning Experiences and the Barriers Faced

Training as a Professional nurse is a rigorous exercise. The student undergoes various learning experiences out of which clinical is the most important. An exploratory study was conducted to determine the student nurse's clinical learning experience during their basic nursing education at selected institutes of nursing education in Pune city, with the objective of determining student nurses’ clinical learning experience and recognizing the barriers in learning. The data was collected using a semi structured questionnaire from 363 students, who had undergone at least one year of training.

Though 68.6% students had desired to be a nurse when they joined the course, 90.91% expressed that theory classes generated interest for clinical. More than 80% of the students responded positively regarding clinical learning experience in relation to nursing process, practicing clinical procedures and clinical supervision. Barriers for learning were mainly in the area of clinical field in particular lack of equipment (46.2%), over work (30.25%), excess number of health professionals especially trainees (31.68%), overcrowded clinical activities (8.26%), uncooperative patient and relatives(5.8%), inadequate clinical time(5.5%). The study findings also revealed that, insensitive ward staff (29.75%), restriction to practice certain nursing procedure due to hospital policy (8%), current practices expected to be done in the clinical area are not as taught in class (33%) are some of the important areas contributing to the barriers in clinical experience.

Students have freely expressed their views which are important for the educators to identify gaps and develop strategies to improve the clinical experience.