Clinical aptitude in nursing students in the presence of complex clinical situations

Abstract

Introduction: Within the educative process, research has been permanently interested in the search looking time more complete answers which knowledge presents to explain all the needs and demands of the current society, for which highly prepared personnel is needed, i.e. oriented to wards reflexive education and not to the recall of knowledge, achieving in this way a higher level in clinical aptitude and thus make a change to education and patient care.

Objective: To explore the degree of clinical aptitude development in baccalaureate nursing and obstetrics students, before initiating and after initiating clinical practice in the pediatric area.

Methodology: A longitudinal, prospective, and analytical study was performed among fourth semester baccalaureate nursing students whose clinical aptitude was measured before initiating practical phase and after its conclusion. An instrument to explore clinical aptitude based on real clinical cases, was constructed and validated.

Results: The instrument had a confiability coefficient of 0.9966 when the formula 20 of Kuder Richardson was applied. The global scores median was 42 with a range of (17 to 60 when proceeding mathematically for the questions' total. No statistical significance was found in either group nor in the indicators according to the Kruskall-Wallis test ant the Wilcoxon test of paired pairs.

Conclusions: The obtained results reflect that clinical aptitude does not only depend on the knowledge obtained in the classroom but on the stimulation of the reflection of real situations. This leads us to the implementation of new educational techniques based on the linkage of knowledge and the real cases away from the traditional education.