[Clinical practice in neonatology during undergraduate nursing course: coping and challenges in a context of changes]

This work aimed to analyze the situational diagnosis of the Undergraduate Nursing clinical practice in the field of Neonatology in different institutions of higher education in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, in order to identify the challenges with regard to the new educational requirements. The research, with an exploratory design and a qualitative approach, concerned the characterization of the clinical practice in the institutional sphere and its dimensioning from the perspective of students. According to the results, along with the conventional planning, having or not a proper environment for training constitutes a significant difference in its development. The generalist clinical practice, as it is now conceived, coexists with the desire for specialization. Students ask for a closer contact to the high-risk newborn infants. One concludes that there's a need for rethinking these issues within the Undergraduate Nursing course.