Nurse trainees' perception of effective clinical instructor characteristics

Objectives

Clinical education and experience in the clinical environment play an important role in shaping the clinical experience. Effective clinical teaching improves the clinical practice of the nursing trainees which in turn improves the quality of patient care. It mandates for the clinical instructor with desired qualities, to have a positive influence in clinical education. This study examined nurse trainees’ perceptions of clinical instructor characteristics.

Methods

The current study was conducted in a multi-cultural tertiary setting using a cross-sectional descriptive design. Using convenience sampling, 302 trainees were chosen as participants for the study, and there were 296 respondents. The data were collected from the participants using the Nursing Clinical Teacher Effectiveness Inventory (NCTEI) tool.

Results

The findings of the study revealed that the clinical instructors have scored high in personality (scoring percentage = 84.0%) and relatively low in teaching ability (scoring percentage = 81.3%). Also, the overall perception was almost the same among all the trainees though there was a slight variation in their rating of each dimension.

Conclusions

Nursing trainees indicated the instructors as having good personality and relatively low teaching ability. This mandates the clinical instructors in the clinical environment to empower themselves in this area of improvement. This helps the teaching institutions to consider all the domains of effective clinical instructor characteristics while recruitment and also organize programs giving emphasis on building and developing these characteristics to create effective instructors.