Career Choices for Macao Nursing Students

Purpose:

The purpose of this presentation is to identify choices on future work among nursing students in Macao.

Methods:

This study used a survey by using questionnaire to explore career choices among all nursing students in Macao. There were 484 undergraduate nursing students registered in a BSN program located in Macao during the 2014-2015 academic-year. The study included all nursing student in Macao. 

Results:

A total of 377 Macao nursing students were included in the study as they completed questionnaires. The return rate was 83.04%. There were 321 (85.1%) female and 56 (14.9%) male student nurses. Their mean age was 21.32 with a range from 18 to 30 years.

The first preference future nursing work arranged by participants included “Community and Public health nursing (n=66, 17.5%)” and “ER Nursing (n=66, 17.5%)”. The second choice for future nursing work was “Paediatric nursing (n=57, 15.1%) followed by “Medical & Surgical Nursing (n=53, 14.1%)”. The third choice for future nursing work was “Midwifery (n=63, 13.7%)” followed by “Psychiatric nursing (n=43, 11.4%)”.  “Aged Care Center (n=49, 13%)” was arrange at ninth preference future nursing work by participants.

Conclusion:

The finding suggested aged care center or intitutes was arranged at ninth preference future nursing work from nursing students in Macao. 

The findings was matched with previous studies for unpopular nursing working places at tenth or the least preferred working place (Deschodt and Milisen, 2010; Haron et al., 2013; Henderson et al., 2008; Kloster, Høie, & Skår, 2007; Shen and Xiao, 2012; Stevens, 2011) or nursing students don’t have any willingness for working in GN after graduation (Flood and Clark, 2009; Neville, 2015a). Those published studies represented almost the same findings across country and periods from China (Shen and Xiao, 2012) to Europe (Kloster et al., 2007), investigator was very suprised that nursing students in Macao also represented the same findings in 2015. The explaination of this finding could be the reason in most nurses in Macao want to work in only one public hospital as the nurse position is a civil servant in Macao which would have more benfits and higher salary than private clinics or institutes. Moreover, there are no public aged center in Macao, this might be the reason in contributing nursing student rated at nine preference work place after graduation. As global ageing and Macao also facing the same situation, this result provided the comprehensive information to Macao nursing educators and administrators.