Caring for Dying Patient and Their Families: The Lived Experiences of Nursing Students in Italy.

BACKGROUND: The literature from recent decades persistently suggests that nurses are not adequately trained in caring for the dying. Numerous studies call for enhanced education in end-of-life care. OBJECTIVE: To explore student nurses' experience of caring for dying persons and their families and how this experience was influenced by their undergraduate education, with a view to improving end-of-life training. METHODS: Narrative interviews were administered to a purposive sample of 18 undergraduate students at Turin University's School of Nursing and analyzed following Giorgi's qualitative phenomenological methodology. RESULTS: The students' accounts featured 4 main themes: emotions and feelings, reactions and coping strategies, growth in personal and professional awareness, and the professional nursing model. Students reporting positive experience of end-of-life care in clinical settings displayed the expected learning outcomes for undergraduate nursing education. CONCLUSION: This study's strength lies in the fact that it draws on student nurses' lived experience to assess training in end-of-life care. It confirms the need to invest in targeted end-of-life education and support for nursing students.

[The ability of Decision Making in nursing students and user satisfaction: a quasi-experimental study]. / L'abilità di Decision Making dello studente infermiere e la soddisfazione degli utenti: uno studio quasi sperimentale.

AIM: The aim of the study is to measure 3rd year students' ability on decision making before and after the internship, where different educational strategies were experienced evaluating self perceived clients satisfaction. METHODS: This is a quasi-experimental pre-post intervention study 14 students of the 3rd year was asked to elaborate six clinical cases, for a total of 84 health care plans both before and after the clinical internship. During the internship discussions led by tutors, briefing and debriefing sessions once a week were set up and health care plans developed by students were used. The Newcastle Satisfaction with Nursing Scales questionnaire was used to detect clients satisfaction administered both during the internship and later on. RESULTS: Students have shown an increase from 19 to 69% in the ability to detect priority health care problems in the post-test as well as in developing correct nursing interventions, from 24 to 33%.Related factors and defining characteristics are improved at the limit of statistical significance. Clients claim they were fully satisfied with received care both with nursing students and without. CONCLUSIONS: Experimented educational strategies seems to be significantly related to the ability of nursing intervention/decision making. The internship has proven to be an effective model of education.

Effectiveness of an educational video as an instrument to refresh and reinforce the learning of a nursing technique: a randomized controlled trial.

The Undergraduate Nursing Course has been using videos for the past year or so. Videos are used for many different purposes such as during lessons, nurse refresher courses, reinforcement, and sharing and comparison of knowledge with the professional and scientific community. The purpose of this study was to estimate the efficacy of the video (moving an uncooperative patient from the supine to the lateral position) as an instrument to refresh and reinforce nursing techniques. A two-arm randomized controlled trial (RCT) design was chosen: both groups attended lessons in the classroom as well as in the laboratory; a month later while one group received written information as a refresher, the other group watched the video. Both groups were evaluated in a blinded fashion. A total of 223 students agreed to take part in the study. The difference observed between those who had seen the video and those who had read up on the technique turned out to be an average of 6.19 points in favour of the first (P < 0.05). The results of the RCT demonstrated that students who had seen the video were better able to apply the technique, resulting in a better performance. The video, therefore, represents an important tool to refresh and reinforce previous learning.