Association of Clinical Caring Competencies of Nursing Students with Academic Performance: A Multi-Institutional Study

Abstract

Nursing students work closely with patients, therefore clinical assignments are regarded as an essential component of nursing education. Objective: To analyze the clinical caring competencies of undergraduate nursing students. Methods: The study design was cross-sectional descriptive having a sample size of 122 students. The nursing students' information was gathered after one months of clinical duties. Three categories, each using a seven-point Likert scale, were used to collect the data. The questionnaire was validly and reliable, while informed consent was taken from each participant and data analysis was performed through SPSS 22.0. Results: The majority of participants was male (87%) in the study, while the maximum number of students belong to age group 18–21 age range (52.7%), and all the students belong to 4th semester. The majority of the students’ academic performance was good (51.1%), followed by average performers (37.4%), and poor performers (11.5%). In all the three domains of clinical competencies the score of patience was high 3.7 ± 0.89, followed by courage domain 3.5 ± 0.88 and cognitive domain 3.4 ± 0.59. Conclusions: There was significant difference between gender groups in cognitive and patience domain while no significant difference in courage domain, while between age groups there were no significant difference between cognitive and patients while there was significant difference in courage domain. The study also established that courage a patient is strongly positive correlated with cognitive domain while negative weak with age, gender and GPA.