Entrepreneurship Awareness and Intention After a Training Program in Nursing Interns: A Pretest-Posttest Study

Background: Entrepreneurship has become an essential competency for healthcare professionals because it promotes innovation, autonomy, and the development of sustainable healthcare services. Although entrepreneurship education has demonstrated positive effects on students' entrepreneurial knowledge and competencies, evidence regarding its effectiveness among nursing interns remains limited. This study examined changes in nursing interns' entrepreneurship awareness, entrepreneurial intention, and entrepreneurial characteristics following participation in a structured entrepreneurship training program. Methods: A quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design with a two-month follow-up assessment was conducted among 168 nursing interns at the Faculty of Nursing, Cairo University. Participants completed three researcher-developed instruments assessing entrepreneurship awareness, entrepreneurial intention, and entrepreneurial characteristics. The intervention consisted of a structured entrepreneurship training program delivered through interactive educational strategies, including lectures, group discussions, brainstorming, case-based learning, and practical activities. Data were analyzed using repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Pearson correlation coefficients. Bonferroni-corrected pairwise comparisons were performed following significant overall repeated-measures effects. Results: Entrepreneurship awareness increased significantly across the three assessment periods, with scores increasing from 6.41 ± 3.16 at baseline to 16.99 ± 3.45 immediately after the intervention and remaining significantly higher at the two-month follow-up (14.42 ± 4.01; p < 0.001). Significant improvements were also observed in overall entrepreneurial characteristics (F = 158.08, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.49), particularly perseverance, demand for efficiency and quality, commitment to work, information seeking, goal setting, and planning. In contrast, entrepreneurial intention did not change significantly across the three assessment periods (F = 1.22, p = 0.30, ηp2 = 0.01). Entrepreneurship awareness was weakly and positively correlated with entrepreneurial intention across the assessment periods (r = 0.165-0.263, p < 0.05). Conclusions: Participation in the entrepreneurship training program was associated with significant improvements in entrepreneurship awareness and entrepreneurial characteristics among nursing interns, whereas entrepreneurial intention did not demonstrate a statistically significant change. Integrating entrepreneurship education into undergraduate nursing curricula may strengthen innovation-related competencies and prepare future nurses to develop sustainable healthcare initiatives. Future controlled longitudinal studies should investigate the psychological and contextual factors that may influence the development of entrepreneurial intention.