An Exploratory Study of First Year Nursing Students Toward Their Perception on The First Experience of Clinical Practice – A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Introduction: Nursing is a practice-based discipline. During their first clinical practice, nursing students may develop their initial perception of this discipline. This perception will then drive the students’ activities during their first clinical experience. The early identification of students’ perception towards clinical practice is imperative to their motivation and overall passion towards providing high-quality nursing care in the future. This study’s objectives are to explore first-year nursing students’ perceptions towards their first experience of clinical practice, to identify problems that faced during the clinical practice, and to explore their interest in the nursing profession. Method: A phenomenological design was used in this study. The sample was first-year nursing students from a bachelor’s program. All participants have undergone a face-to-face in-depth interview with the guidance of a semi-structured interview format. Result: There were three themes derived from the interview sessions. The students had a mixture of feelings towards the clinical practice. The positive perceptions were a feeling of excitement, a feeling of satisfaction, and positive support by the clinical instructors. As for the negative perception, the findings were the feelings of fear, nervousness, stress and lack of confidence. Conclusion: The majority of the participants expressed having mixed feelings of excitement and hesitancy. Excitement feeling is an effective boosting mechanism towards performing better clinical practice in the field. Whereas hesitancy feeling needs to be corrected by providing more hands-on training opportunities before going into clinical placement. This training approach is believed to be able to improve their skills and knowledge hence eliminating the feeling of hesitancy towards the clinical practice.