Abstract:
Clinical learning is a vital component in the curricula of nursing
education, providing an opportunity to student nurses to combine cognitive,
psychomotor, and affective skills. Evaluation is a basic part of clinical education.
There are a number of problems and challenges associated with evaluation of
clinical training of student nurses. Some of these concerns are subjectivity and
variability in the use of effective clinical evaluation tools to evaluate the
psychomotor, affective and cognitive learning domains. These invariably
safeguards patients from unsafe practice. The purpose of the study is to explore
the views and experiences of preceptors and clinical instructors regarding
evaluation of student nurses’ clinical training. The study utilized a descriptive
case study methodology and was conducted at Cape Coast Teaching Hospital. Ten
preceptors and five clinical instructors participated in the study. The data was
collected, using face-to-face interviews of fifteen participants each. The data was
analyzed using thematic content analysis approach. Several themes emerged from
the data analysis. Examples of these include problems with the evaluation
process, subjectivity of evaluation tool, increased number of students, training
needs and inappropriate clinical placement. It is recommended that preceptors and
clinical instructors need to be professionally trained to fit for their demanding
role. Again, the training should be ongoing to support and improve the quality of
students’ evaluation.
