Student nurses' perceptions of their contact time with stakeholders in their clinical instruction

This article reports on a descriptive study that investigated student nurses' perceptions of their contact time with clinical staff regarding their clinical instruction. Literature on ward teaching as the responsibility of the clinical instructor identifies many problems that the clinical instructor encounters when she needs to fulfil this role. In some studies, issues such as feeling like an outsider and not having enough information about the patients that they may need to work with to teach the student, have been voiced (Nerhring, 1990, Clifford, 1993). Third and fourth year students at a nursing college in KwaZulu-Natal were given self-administered questionnaires. A purposive convenient sample was used, where 59 students in total were part of this study. A 79% response rate from the questionnaire was received. The findings of the study showed that both third and fourth year students were visited more by the clinical instructor than by the tutor. More important, is the finding that 53% of the students had no visits from a tutor within a period of three months, while 23% of the students had not had a single visit in three months from their clinical instructor. It is not surprising; therefore, that 74% of the students in this study believed that the visits they had received from the tutor were inadequate. Fifty one percent of the students selected the ward sister as the ideal person for the role of clinical instruction. This study highlights the importance of consistent clinical instruction by the clinical instructor and the ward sister.