Clinical reasoning skills in undergraduate nursing students: An observational study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/dn/19389Keywords:
nursing student, education, NRCS, non-technical skills, clinical reasoningAbstract
BACKGROUND:
Nurses use clinical reasoning to assimilate information, analyzed data, and make decisions regarding patient care. Research suggests that nursing students have to acquire clinical reasoning skills early in the classroom and in clinical environments to be prepared for their future role. So far, few studies evaluated the degree of acquisition of clinical reasoning skills among nursing students.
AIM:
The primary goal of the study was to assess clinical reasoning skills among nursing students. The secondary goal was to analyze factors related to clinical reasoning skills.
METHODS:
A cross-sectional study was carried out. The Italian version of the instrument Nurse Clinical Reasoning Scale was administered at the University of Milan. Anova Test and Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to explore factors related to clinical reasoning.
RESULTS:
A number of 205 students replied to the questionnaire. Students stated difficulties in acquiring skills useful to the development of clinical reasoning. The academic year attended (p<0.001), motivation (p=0.04), the number of hours spent in clinical environments (p< 0.001), and the number of internship experiences (p<0.001) showed a statistically significant correlation with clinical reasoning. The results also showed that, regardless of the modality of the clinical internship, the students have developed equal clinical reasoning skills (p=0.62).
CONCLUSIONS:
This study showed the importance of measuring clinical reasoning skills among nursing students. Future investigations should be conducted to confirm our results.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Ilaria Marcomini, Neva Perboni, Laura Milani, Ippolito Notarnicola
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Accepted 2022-12-23
Published 2023-01-30
