BackgroundNursing student's experiences of their clinical practice provide greater insight to develop an effective clinical teaching strategy in nursing education. The main objective of this study was to investigate student nurses' experience about their clinical practice.MethodsFocus groups were used to obtain students' opinion and experiences about their clinical practice. 90 baccalaureate nursing students at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery) were selected randomly from two hundred students and were arranged in 9 groups of ten students. To analyze the data the method used to code and categories focus group data were adapted from approaches to qualitative data analysis.ResultsFour themes emerged from the focus group data. From the students' point of view," initial clinical anxiety", "theory-practice gap"," clinical supervision", professional role", were considered as important factors in clinical experience.ConclusionThe result of this study showed that nursing students were not satisfied with the clinical component of their education. They experienced anxiety as a result of feeling incompetent and lack of professional nursing skills and knowledge to take care of various patients in the clinical setting.

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An aqueous solution of potassium carbonate is an appropriate absorbent for cost-effective separation of CO2 from flue gas. Amine-promoted potassium carbonate has the potential to take advantage of both absorbents. In this study, a mathematical model has been developed to simulate the absorption of CO2 into promoted potassium carbonate solutions in a hollow fiber membrane contactor, where monoethanolamine, diethanolamine, and methyldiethanolamine have been considered as promoters. A numerical scheme was applied to solve the simultaneous partial differential equations in the liquid, membrane, and gas phases, and the results were validated with available experimental data in the literature for all promoters. The effects of the promoter concentration, temperature, gas and liquid flow rates, flow directions, axial diffusion in the gas phase, and possible wetting of the membrane were investigated using the model. The promoted solution with monoethanolamine had much higher flux, about 4 times superior to non-promoted absorbent. Simulation results indicated that the promoted potassium carbonate is only effective in a specific range of operating conditions. The membrane wetting can reduce the flux impressively for all solutions; however, the flux was still much higher than non-promoted solution even at high wetting fractions.

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