Nursing Student’s Perceptions Of The Roles Of Clinical Instructors In Clinical Practice Coaching For Patient Safety

Abstract

Nursing education has a responsibility in creating the safety culture for all patients and health care providers in order to enhance health outcomes. Clinical instructors not only play the pivotal roles in assisting the students with clinical skills development, but rather in coaching patient safety. We conducted a qualitative study to explore the perceptions and expectations of nursing students toward the roles of clinical instructors in clinical practice coaching for patient safety. The study used a purposive sampling method for selecting participants for a focus group. The participants comprised 12 students from the profession program of Faculty of Nursing, Universitas Indonesia year 2013/ 2014. Data was gathered by conducting semi- structured interviews, and were analyzed by using content analysis process. Our findings revealed five main issues on safety that were perceived by nursing students: (1) the current patient safety practices, includingthe increasing awareness and actions of patient safety, (2) the safety incidents amongst the students during clinical practices, comprising the frequent exposure to the physical and psychological hazards, (3) safety incident management, including the absence of the protocols of handling system for the hospital staffs as well as the absence of the integrated incident database between the hospitals and universities, (5) barriers to the implementation of clinical safety among the students, including the absence of integrated implementation, monitoring, and reportingsystem for the safety incidents. This study concluded that the practice of safety only focused on the patients. Meanwhile, the practice of safety for health care providers including for nursing students was still low.