Abstract
Nurse educators and nurse preceptors play a fundamental role in facilitating nursing students' acquisition and utilization of professional competencies. Previous studies about key elements for teaching and learning about pain in nursing education programs include students' personal characteristics and previous experiences; educators' knowledge, skills, and beliefs; learners' exposure to leaders in pain education; and curricular pain content and delivery approaches. These studies were mainly carried out in developed countries, with a context of educational and health care systems different from those of developing countries. The current study explores academics', clinical nurse preceptors', and nursing students' perceptions about factors influencing the facilitation of nursing students' competency for paediatric pain management in Rwanda. A qualitative descriptive exploratory design was used in this study that utilized in-depth interviews with six nurse educators and eight nurse preceptors, and focus group discussions with nineteen senior year nursing students. The study setting included five sites: two academic institutions and three clinical settings. Narratives from participants were transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic analysis. The analysis yielded six themes describing factors that affected the facilitation of students' learning about paediatric pain management. The themes included student motivation, facilitators' attributes, collaboration between academics and clinicians, nurses' limited autonomy for decision-making regarding PPM practices, shortage of human and material resources, and educational qualification. Knowing these factors is essential as it provides an opportunity to design targeted interventions aimed to enhance the capacity of nurse educators and clinical nurse preceptors involved in teaching nursing students about paediatric pain management.
Highlights
Efforts have been made to utilize effective means for pain relief, yet children continue to suffer unnecessarily
The themes included student motivation, facilitators’ attributes, collaboration between academics and clinicians, nurses’ limited autonomy for decision-making regarding PPM practices, shortage of human and material resources, and educational qualification. Knowing these factors is essential as it provides an opportunity to design targeted interventions aimed to enhance the capacity of nurse educators and clinical nurse preceptors involved in teaching nursing students about paediatric pain management
Little is known about factors influencing the facilitation of nursing students to learn PPM in the Rwandan context, a qualitative descriptive approach was deemed appropriate for the current study to explore and describe perceptions of nurse educators, nurse preceptors, and nursing students about the topic
Summary
Efforts have been made to utilize effective means for pain relief, yet children continue to suffer unnecessarily. Or undermanaged paediatric pain can lead to a prolonged hospital stay for the paediatric patient, and the risk of developing chronic and persistent pain [4,5], as well as other implications for the psychosocial, spiritual, and financial state of the entire family, associated with the child’s delay in recovery [6,7] All these concerns highlight the importance of the optimal management of paediatric pain. Optimal nursing management of pain in children requires nurses to be knowledgeable about pain mechanisms, the epidemiology of pain, barriers to effective pain relief, commonly encountered pain conditions, and appropriate methods to assess and alleviate the pain [9] In this regard, nurse educators and nurse preceptors play a fundamental role in facilitating nursing students’ acquisition and utilization of pain management competencies as the generation of nurses. The role of nurse academicians and preceptors to collaboratively prepare nursing students achieving their professional goals and to develop work-ready nurses has been emphasized by other researchers [10,11]
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