The Meaning of "Human Caring" From Nursing Students' Perspectives After the First Clinical Practice

Background：The first clinical practice has a great impact on nursing students because these students can actually experience the real practices and rethink the true meaning of nursing profession. The initial objectives of the first clinical practice in a nursing undergraduate program focused on providing nursing technical skills such as bathing or feeding to meet the basic needs of patients. In this way, however, students seemed to only concentrate on performing clinical skills as instructed in front of patients, clinical instructors, and teachers. Many students concerned so much about carrying out the assigned technical skills, and thus they tended to disregard a patient as a unique individual who has various different needs. Nevertheless, after the clinical practice, some students pondered a question whether or not their performing skills were truly for patients. We, therefore, decided to modify educational objectives of the first clinical practice such that students could focus on observing caring activities provided to patients by professional nurses. For example, students were given assignments to see how nurses approached patients, what rationale nurses had in providing specific nursing care to patients, and what values nurses respected most in caring patients.

Purpose：The purpose of this study is to investigate the meaning of “human caring” from the perspective of sophomore nursing students in Japan after their first clinical practice and to examine difference in their experiences before and after changing the educational objectives of their first clinical practice.

Methods：Qualitative descriptive study was employed in this research. Two sets of data were used for this study; one data set was collected in 2015, in which 105 students had the clinical practice with the initial objectives, and the other data was collected from 109 students experienced the clinical practice after modifying the educational objectives in 2016. Both data were abstracted by short essays of students descripting about what they think of “human caring”. Specifically, in the essay, students described about a scene chosen from their clinical practice that they thought of representing “human caring” as well as the reason why they choose the scene.

Content analysis method was used for this study. First we used a software named Text Mining Studio to analyze Japanese dependency structure of sentences in all the essays and obtained key descriptions. Second, the top ten dependency sentence structures frequently found in the students writing were used as references to further abstract data. Third, four researchers examined all the abstracted descriptions and selected valid data for analyzing human caring experience of students. Lastly, the abstracted descriptions both in 2015 and 2016 were compared in order to see differences in data.

Results：This study is currently in process. The analysis will be completed during spring 2017.

Implications：The results of this study will be used to evaluate the current design of clinical practice as well as guide and develop a better clinical practice for nursing students in Japan.