A Study on the Effects of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing Practicum Using Storytelling

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to improve the empathy, communication efficacy, and communication skills of nursing students through a psychiatric nursing practice program using storytelling by allowing the students to immerse in the narratives and identify themselves with the main characters with mental illness. This study is a single group pretest-posttest design that applied psychological nursing practice using storytelling to 46 nursing students from a local university in Korea and evaluated its effectiveness. Data analysis was performed by a paired t-test to compare the effects of the participants’ empathy, communication self-efficacy, and therapeutic communication ability using SPSS 21.0 program. The results showed that psychiatric nursing practice using storytelling had an effect on the empathy (t=3.565, p=.001) and communication self-efficacy (t=2.320, p=.025) of nursing students. Based on these results, psychiatric and mental health clinical practice curriculums should be developed to improve nursing students’ understanding of mental disorders and develop their communication ability with patients.