The View Point of Nursing and Midwifery Students about Characteristics of Effective Clinical Instructors

Abstract

Introduction: Since the major part of professional nursing education takes place in clinics, clinical teaching is considered one of the most important parts of nursing education process. Accordingly, clinical teaching effectiveness and the characteristics of an effective teaching have overshadowed a good number of nursing and midwifery research studies. Clinical teaching is one of the important subjects in nursing education. It should be considered two important factors for quality improving of clinical education, university students and clinical instructors. This study aims to assess students view point about characteristics of effective clinical instructors in Lar Faculty.Materials & Methods: This is a descriptive cross sectional study was performed to 274 students of nursing and midwifery, the data gathering tool was a questionnaire of 49 questions in the five subscales of professional, personal, communicative, teaching methods and evaluation characteristics using 0 to 7 likert scale. The data were analyzed by SPSS software.Results: The results show that the most important characteristic of effective clinical instructors were having scientific knowledge (6.88 ± 0.40), being righteous (6.87 ± 0.44) and being trustworthy (6.86 ± 0.52), and the least important characteristic were educating clinical ward’s staff (6.49 ± 0.76), observe student’s work (6.50 ± 0.84), and being enthusiastic (6.52 ± 0.83). The students’ perceptions of effective clinical characteristics identified teaching methods subscale as the most important (6.75 ± 0.44) one.Conclusion: All of the characteristics of effective clinical instructors identified in this study by students and were rated high. Thus all instructors should try to achieve these characteristics. It has been suggested that these characteristics were introduced to all instructors