The COVID‐19 crisis in Spain has exacerbated the shortage of nursing staff to respond to increasing healthcare demands. For this reason, nursing students were requested to collaborate voluntarily as auxiliary health staff. This emergency has led to mental health problems in health professionals, hence the relevance of coping techniques. The objectives of this study were to explore the experiences and emotional responses of final‐year nursing students who volunteered to carry out healthcare relief tasks during the peak of the COVID‐19 pandemic, and to identify the coping strategies they adopted to deal with this situation. A qualitative study was conducted in the constructivist paradigm. Purposive sampling was used, and twenty‐two students participated in semi‐structured interviews, which were then content‐analysed. The study is reported using the COREQ checklist. Five themes emerged in the ‘Experiences and emotional response’ dimension (context, patients, emotions and feelings, risk of contagion, and personal satisfaction), and three themes emerged in the ‘Coping strategies’ dimension strategies in the work environment, in daily life and personal life. Although the students expressed negative emotions due to the highly complex context and lack of professional experience, they evaluated the experience positively in terms of learning and usefulness. Most notably, the students employed adaptive coping strategies to deal with the pandemic.
Aim
To explore the perception of education and professional development of final-year nursing students who carried out health relief tasks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a global health emergency. This situation has exacerbated the need for additional healthcare employees, forcing the Spanish government to incorporate volunteer nursing students as auxiliary health staff.
Design
A qualitative study framed in the constructivist paradigm.
Methods
Twenty-two students of nursing were recruited. A purposeful sampling was implemented until reaching saturation. A semi-structured interview as a conversational technique was used to collect information based on three dimensions: academic curriculum, disciplinary professional development, and patient care. Subsequently, a content analysis of the information was carried out. Three phases were followed in the data analysis process: theoretical, descriptive-analytical, and interpretive. The COREQ checklist was used to evaluate the study.
Results
The most important results are linked to the students’ professional and academic preparation, how the nurses handled the pandemic situation and the characteristics of the COVID-19 patients.
Conclusions
Students require training in order to offer holistic care to patients, adapted to the context. Participants highlight the importance of professional values and recognize a high level of competence and autonomy in nurses.
Nursing staff who provide care in the nursing homes of Catalonia have more precarious work conditions, including more demanding schedules and work overload, than those in other areas of care. This situation entails two major problems: Detrimental health results for nurses who face psychosocial and physical risks and a negative impact on the care provided to patients, with a decrease in the quality of care. This study aimed to describe the precarious employment situation of nursing staff in nursing homes. We carried out a descriptive study based on the employment precariousness scale (EPRES), which was administered to a sample of 239 nurses and nursing assistants working in public and private nursing homes in Catalonia. The highest level of job insecurity occurred among nursing assistants and in privately managed nursing homes. The precariousness of the working conditions of nursing staff poses a risk both to the workers themselves and to the people they tend to. For this reason, there is a need for greater knowledge on the scale of the problem and the implementation of appropriate legislative measures to alleviate it.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Objective: This study sought to understand the effects of a pedagogical resource combining a multi-moment debriefing model with reflective journaling that is designed to develop reflective competence.Design: A qualitative educational study was used with an instrumental case study design.Participating in the study were 32 nursing students who wrote 96 individual reflective journals in accordance with each moment (M1, M2, M3) of the proposed reflective practice resource.The journaling was conducted during both the clinical simulation activity and the period of clinical practice. Methods: The reflective journals resulting from the high-fidelity clinical simulation process were used to explore three moments of learning: debriefing immediately after simulation, postscenario debriefing, and clinical practice. The typology of content analysis used was classical content analysis, which followed a deductive logic, since to assess reflection levels the 5Rs Reflective Writing Scale was used.Results: In the post simulation moment (M1), students produced a greater number of meaningful units associated with a level of strategic narrative reflection. During clinical practice however reflection was more analytical, with the highest level of reflection.
Conclusion:Nursing students developed reflective competence through an iterative process of reflective practice establishing a continuum between simulation experience and clinical.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.