[Effective reflection on clinical competency of nursing students]

Objective [s]: With the ever-growing increase of knowledge in today's global society, teachers now feel it is necessary to train students to become reflective thinkers. This issue is particularly important for nursing students who are responsible for taking care of patients

Method: Forty-two nursing students voluntarily participated in this study. After explaining the aims of the study to the participants, they took part in the clinical skills test. They were divided into two equal case and control groups. The control group took part in routine clinical programs and the cases participated in routine clinical programs plus an interventional program. They were asked to reflect on their clinical experiences for the last 12 weeks of their clinical course and take part in the clinical skills test again. Baseline and post-test data were compared among two groups

Results: The results confirmed the role of reflection on clinical competency, and the two groups were different with respect to learning clinical skills

Conclusion: The findings suggest that clinical skills test should be implemented in the nursing curriculum in Iran as one of the necessary criteria for competency

[Assessment of high risk pregnancy in Bam Mahdieh maternity hospital, 2001]

Background and aim: attention to health of mother during pregnancy is essential for the health of both mother and infant. Early detection of high-risk pregnancies is fundamental for prenatal care. This survey was performed to find the prevalence of the high-risk pregnancies and causing factors in the maternity hospital of Bam in 2001

Method: this descriptive and cross sectional study was performed on 850 randomly selected pregnant women

Results: we found that 11.8% of the cases were younger than 18 years, 6.6% were older than 35 years, 8.8% had five or more pregnancies, 5.4% had pre-term, 6.3% had post-term labor, 2% had hemorrhaged pregnancy and 4.2% indicated signs of preeclampsia. The prevalence of various diseases were as follows: 12.3% afflicted with urinary infection, 0.8% had addiction. 0.4% had sexual transmitted disease, 0.4% had anemia, 0.6% had thyroid disease, 0.6% had cardiac diseases, 0.1% had liver disease, 9.1% had diabetes mellitus and 4.3% afflicted with more than one disease. Also 22.9% had low birth weight

Conclusion: inappropriate age, urinary tract infection, hemorrhage and hypertension were the most important health problems of the pregnant women. For prevention of the high-risk pregnancies, education and prenatal care are necessary