RN's Attribute Developing Nursing Competencies to Participation in an International Clinical Experience as a Student

Institute of Medicine (2003, 2010) identified five core nursing competencies that are essential for registered nurses to function in today’s healthcare.  One specifically is to function as an effective member in an interprofessional team through interprofessional collaboration and teamwork.  Nursing education is called to identify effective teaching-learning strategies on how to educate pre-licensure nursing students to develop the interprofessional competency.  

In response to the need to discover evidence-based pedagogical strategies, one underdeveloped but popular trend in nursing education was participation in international clinical experiences during short, week-long immersion programs.  International clinical experiences traditionally are defined as nursing students and their faculty provide free healthcare to impoverished people of developing countries.   International learning experiences offered to nursing students yielded short and long-term outcomes that showed improved cultural competency, civic engagement, global perspective, and character growth in their personal and professional worlds.  Although these benefits were important attributes towards the development of an individual, they did not address specific competencies that are required for professional nurses.  The combination of these two elements, international clinical experiences and interprofessional collaboration and teamwork competency, offered a new opportunity to explore in order to address how to meet the new requirements for undergraduate nursing education.

A basic qualitative research study was conducted to gain insight on participants’ long-term perceptions of participating in an international clinical experience during their undergraduate nursing program.  Newly employed baccalaureate prepared registered nurses were interviewed about their lasting impressions of their international clinical experience in Kingston, Jamaica where they provided free healthcare to the impoverished communities in their final year of their nursing program.  The week-long field experience comprised of physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, and nursing students.  Interview questions focused on participants’ perceptions of interprofessional collaboration and teamwork and how the international clinical experience influenced the participants’ clinical practice as a registered nurse.   Each participant was a registered nurse within their first year of professional employment.  Eight interviews were conducted until data saturation occurred. 

Through constant-comparison data analysis, 7 themes emerged.  Each of the 7 findings demonstrated that there have been long-term positive impacts over the registered nurses’ professional practice after participating in an abroad healthcare experience 20 months earlier. These findings were connected to the theoretical framework, Wilson’s (1993) International Experience Model to construct a meaningful relationship of the phenomenon that was studied.  Five of the seven results supported the current literature about interprofessional educational offerings or outcomes post-participation in an abroad experience.  These findings were significant as they reinforced the importance of interprofessional educational in healthcare and strengthened understanding about abroad clinical programs.  This research extended the body of knowledge for both topics as these findings encompassed long-term effects of these experiences.

The last 2 findings were new and unique to the study.  These findings advanced educators’ understanding of the significance that interprofessional, international clinical experiences offer to the development of nursing competencies for student nurses.  The perceived long-term benefits by the participants of interprofessional, international clinical experiences inspire how educators may tailor clinical abroad immersion experiences as well as investigate how traditional clinical experiences in undergraduate nursing education programs can modify their current approach. 

This research study’s significant findings meet the educational call to identify an evidence-based pedagogical strategy that develops interprofessional collaboration and teamwork and meets the diverse learner’s needs to have the ability to participate in an international clinical experience.