Correlation of Students’ Academic Achievements at a Professional Course of Ethics and Pediatrics Clinical Practice at Mizan-Tepi University, South Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region, Ethiopia

Abstract

Nursing is a respect for dignity and treating every person equally. Qualifying competent and ethical nurses requires the incorporation of a professional code of ethics with clinical nursing practice. However, no study was conducted on the relationship between professional ethics and clinical nursing practice. Therefore this study aimed to determine correlation between professional ethics and pediatrics clinical practice from an achievement perspective. Accordingly, cross-sectional study design was conducted at Mizan-Tepi University using nursing students’ academic achievements at professional ethics and pediatric practice. Collected data were entered into Epi info 7. SPSS version 21.0 was used to calculate spearman’s rho correlation (rs) and coefficient of determination (R2) at P < .05. A total of 316 study participants comprising of 209 (66.14%) male and 107 (33.86%) female nursing students included in the current study. Nursing students’ academic achievements at professional ethics was significantly and positively associated with achievements at pediatrics clinical practice (rs = 0.4-0.6), P < .001. Linear regression results revealed 25% to 26.7% coefficient determination for regular students and 18% to 22.9% for summer nursing students. To sum up, there was a significant positive association between achievements of students at professional ethics and pediatrics clinical practice. Therefore increasing students’ academic achievement in professional ethics can further improve their achievements at pediatrics clinical practice. However, academic achievement in professional ethics explained 22.35% of the variability in achievements at pediatric clinical practice. 77.65% of the variability in pediatrics clinical practice was due to other factors that deserve another study.