The care of and communication with older people from the perspective of student nurses. A mixed method study
Introduction
The focus of this study is undergraduate student nurses' views on the care of and communication with older people. The need for care of older people continues to expand because the older population is increasing worldwide. Consequently, student nurses need to acquire the skills needed to become professional nurses. Hence, undergraduate nurse education needs to support student nurses to acquire the necessary competence to care for and communicate with older persons. However, more knowledge is needed about these issues and how to adequately prepare student nurses for good communication with older persons.
Section snippets
Background
In nurse education, educators are central to inspiring students to learn, and a range of factors can motivate student learning (Regan, 2003). However, previous research describes students' interest in care of older people as moderate (Carlson and Idvall, 2015, Cheng et al., 2015). Other studies have noted that most student nurses are not interested in caring for older people (Haron et al., 2013, McCann et al., 2010, Stevens, 2011) and that communication with older people is seen as problematic (
Methods
We performed a descriptive study using a mixed-method approach (Sandelowski, 2000). Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from a questionnaire completed by third-year student nurses in 2015. The quantitative data were obtained from three questions designed to elicit the student nurses' attitudes towards and perspectives on the care of and communication with older persons. The qualitative data were obtained from an open-ended question.
Sample Description
A convenience sample of undergraduate student nurses was derived from students in the final semester of the nursing programme. Of the 101 students who were eligible, 94 completed the questionnaire (a response rate of 92%). Of those 94, 75 completed the open-ended question. The participants were aged between 22 and 54 years (median age, 28 years), and most were female (n = 83, 88%). About half of the students (n = 49, 52%) had worked within health care before they started in the nursing programme, and
Discussion
The student nurses in this study mostly reported positive attitudes to the care of and communication with older people. They noted the importance of building a relationship, the techniques used for clear communication and the influences of external prerequisites for good communication. However, our findings show that the students have a relatively shallow understanding of the complexity of communication, possibly because of their limited experience of caring for older people in real life. In
Conclusions
The student nurses reported positive attitudes about the care of and communication with older people, although their views revealed a somewhat shallow understanding of the communication skills needed. Challenges remain in terms of how best to increase undergraduate student nurses' awareness of effective communication skills and to prepare them to care for older people. We recommend that, as part of communication training for student nurses, educators should focus more on addressing older
Contributions
Study design: AS, IKH; acquisition of data: LHM; analysis: LHM, IKH, KS, MSM, AJS; drafting of the article: LHM, IKH, KS, MSM, AJS.
Conflict of Interest
The authors have no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgements
We thank all student nurses who participated in the study for their contribution to this project.
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