Predicting stress in pre‐registration nursing students

Abstract

Since self-report and personal, rather than academic, concerns predict stress, personal teachers need to play a key role in supporting students through 'active listening', especially when students self-report high levels of stress and where personal/social problems are evident. The work-life balance of students, especially those with child-care responsibilities, should be a central tenet in curriculum design in nurse education (and, indeed, the education of other professional and occupational groups). There may be some benefit in offering stress management (coping skills) training to nursing students and, indeed, students of other disciplines.

Coping and health in novice and experienced nursing students during clinical practice: a descriptive, differential and correlational analysis

“…The results also indicated that problem-focused coping was used significantly more by students than emotion focused coping, which coincided with the results reported in most of the reviewed studies [17][18][19][20] but differed from studies in which the most commonly-used strategies were emotion focused coping strategies [24,25] or those that reported not differences [26] .…”

“…These results were the same for all students irrespective of the year of study or experience. This may be due to the fact that the relationships between EFC and health are immediate and direct [17,18,24,35] , whereas relationships between PFC and health are mediated by other factors. Thus, Gibbons et al [5] explored the relationship between sources of stress and psychological well-being and considered how different sources of stress and coping resources may function as moderators and mediators on well-being.…”

“…Other authors [4,[22][23][24] have reported that students mainly use emotion-focused strategies when responding to stress. However, Lo [25] , in a longitudinal study with Australian nursing students, found that students used both PFC and the EFC strategies during three training courses and no significant differences were observed.…”

“…Eleven of the 26 studies [5,17,18,20,21,24,[31][32][33][34][35] reviewed examined the coping associated with biopsychosocial response to stress. All coincided that problem-focused coping strategies are positively associated with well-being (adaptive in this sense) while emotion-focused coping strategies increase negative symptoms (less adaptive).…”

Evaluation of factors of stress among Nursing Students

“…These stressors might disturb the learning ability and academic "performance of the students [4]. The most often reported stressors were failure and uncertainty related to performance and expectations for clinical practice [5]. "…”