A longitudinal study of caring group on the caring ability of undergraduate nursing students

Abstract

Objective To investigate the effect of creating caring group on the caring ability of undergraduate nursing students, and to put forward strategies for cultivating the caring ability of undergraduate nursing students. Method A total of 80 nursing freshmen who provided voluntary informed consent to par-ticipate in the study were divided into 2 groups. Students in the control group were taught with routine teaching mode, while the students in experimental group were recruited to caring group on the basis of control group' s routine teaching. Caring group were conducted team activities regularly, which included topic discussion, experience sharing, interest games and team report so on. The experimental group and control group were surveyed by Caring Ability Inventory (CAI) during the beginning, middle and the end period of the research. SPSS 20.0 was used for data processing and the data was made descriptive analysis, t test, and analysis of variance. Results Before the intervention, the CAI total scores of the experimental group and the control group were (184.55±13.25) and (186.67±25.11) respectively and there was no statistically significant difference on the total score and scores in three dimensions. Compared with the norm of foreign countries, the caring ability of the students was at middle and low level. The scores of experimental group and control group in the cognitive dimension increased with higher grade, but there was no statisti-cally significant difference between two groups. The two groups' scores in patience and courage sub-scales also increased with grade level and experimental group had significant higher scores than control group in the two sub-scales (P<0.05). Conclusion Caring ability of undergraduate nurs-ing students in our school is low. Caring group can effectively improve students' caring ability. Nursing students' caring ability culti-vation strategies need to be explored. Key words: Caring group; Undergraduate nursing student; Caring ability; Cultivation