Examining Nursing Students’ Opinions on the Nursing Process and the Difficulties They Experience
Aylin Palloş, Elif Aleyna Özdede, Tuğba Öztürk, Asude Nur BiçerObjective: This study aims to determine students’ views on the nursing process and the difficulties experienced at each stage.
Method: The population of the descriptive research consists of all second-, third-, and fourth-year students studying in the nursing department of a health sciences faculty during the 2019-2020 academic year (N = 575). The sample consists of 219 students who were randomly selected using the non-probability sampling method and who volunteered to participate in the study. Ethics committee and institutional approvals were obtained. Data were collected using the Student Information Form. The data have been evaluated as frequencies, percentages, and averages using the program SPSS 22.0.
Results: The participants’ mean age was determined as 20.78±1.4 years, and 88.6% are female. Of the students, 64.8% were determined to have received training on the nursing process, 48.4% to have mostly received training from professional practice courses and 26.9% from elective courses, 75.3% to have most frequently utilized lecture notes, and 69.4% to have frequently utilized Internet resources during the nursing process training. Of the students, 91.8% were seen to have selected the nursing process in the field of practice; however, the majority of them (85.4%) had difficulties, with 62.1% encountering many problems in the assessment stage, 61.2% in the evaluation stage, and 58.4% in the implementation stage. Of the students, 91.8% believe that the nursing process is practical for professional development; 91.3% believe that it is one of the tasks, authorities, and responsibilities of nurses; 91.3% believe that it contributes to determining priorities in patient care, and 90.0% believe that it provides written evidence related to care. However, 53.0% were noted to not feel ready to implement the nursing process, 52.1% to not consider the practical training they’d received to be adequate, and 51.1% to consider the nursing process to have not proceeded with the same significance between training periods.
Conclusion: Consequently, nursing students specified believing in the significance of the nursing process; however, they had challenges in every stage of the nursing process, particularly assessment and evaluation.
