Date
11-13-2024
Department
School of Nursing
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in Nursing (PhD)
Chair
RuthAnne Kuiper
Keywords
clinical education, nurse preceptors, preceptor workshop, hands-on, student preparedness
Disciplines
Nursing
Recommended Citation
Bailey, Courtney Eileen, "Improving Student's Hands-On Clinical Experience Through Staff Development" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 6148.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/6148
Abstract
Precepting students in clinical practice is a widely accepted practice for nursing education. Preceptors are nursing staff on the units working on the days the students come to practice clinical skills. These preceptors typically have minimal to no training in precepting, making them expert clinicians but novice educators. This situation can lead to a lack of knowledge of how to guide students in hands-on clinical skills during the student’s time at clinical. This lack of hands-on skills creates a poor clinical perception for the student and reduces their preparedness for practice. The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest, within-subjects design research was to propose a solution to this problem by providing the unit nurses with a workshop describing a tool they can use to help guide nursing students in hands-on skills during clinical. Twenty nurses from various units were given a workshop and a Preceptor Self-Efficacy Instrument that examined their preceptor abilities before and one month after the workshop. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test of the pre and post-workshop survey data revealed that there was a statistically significant difference (p = .040) between the two scores. These results lead the primary investigator to believe that it would be beneficial to repeat the study considering the limitations. Further study should also bring in the study of student perceptions.
