Qualitative study of early clinical experience in nursing professional degree graduates

Abstract

Objective To explore nursing professional degree graduates' understanding and expetance of advanced practice nurses (APN) , reflect on the process of clinical practice teaching, and provide a reference for APN traning by interviewing nursing graduates for their experience of clinical roles. Methods Using the phenomenological method of qualitative research, a semi-structured interview was conducted among 20 individuals, including nursing professional degree graduates who were practiced in clinical for 3 months, instructors and clinical lecturers. The Colaizzi seven-step analysis method is used to repeatedly read, analyze, encode, classify, and refine the interview materials, and summarize the theme ideas. Results After encoding, analyzing and condensing the data, we obtained four themes in APN and their supervisors' training and understanding of APN roles. Theme 1: Combined development of reseatch and clinical abilities, and attention was paid to specialty abilities; theme 2: their overall quality and clinical thinking should be enhanced; theme 3: their professional quality and confidence should be improved; theme 4: a harmonious medical working environment should be built, and policy support should be enhanced. Conclusions Starting from clinical actualities, learning clinical practice experience, exploring nursing students and their supervisors' understanding and expetance of APN, and discussing the problems and causes in current clinical practice training may provide a reference for nursing educators to improve the clinical teaching practice model for APNs. Key words: Nursing professional degree; Advanced practice nurses; Clinical experience; Qualitative study