Evaluation of clinical training of student nurses at the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital

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.