Clinical judgment of nursing students in clinical education: A look during a time of pandemic

Abstract

Introduction: Learning clinical judgment in initial nursing training is essential for nursing practice. Clinical judgment integrates previous clinical experiences, knowledge and skills development from multiple learning modalities. As a clinical context with varied situations, clinical teaching provides opportunities for the development of clinical judgment that is indispensable for decision-making in the care process. The pandemic lead to changes in nursing education, among them, the limitation of students' access to clinical teaching places. Likely causing some interference in the learning of clinical judgment. Goals: To describe the importance of learning clinical judgment in clinical teaching and to identify the factors that interfere with this learning, during a pandemic. Methods: A qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive study, whose data collection strategy was an online focus group with 6 students in the last clinical teaching of the Degree in Nursing. Data analysis was performed by content analysis according to Bardin using webQDA® software. Results: The “Essence for Action” category, with 15 registration units, emerged as the most valued in the “Contributions of Clinical Judgment Learning to Clinical Teaching” dimension. The category “Learning Environments”, with 23 recording units, was the most valued in the “Factors that Interfere with Clinical Judgment Learning” dimension. Conclusions: Clinical judgment is considered by nursing student as fundamental for individualized nursing intervention. It appears that the context in which the student's clinical experience took place had a great impact on the learning of clinical judgment, with the pandemic being considered a challenging factor in the context of learning.