The characteristics of an effective clinical instructor from the perspective of nursing students: a qualitative descriptive study in Iran.

BACKGROUND: Clinical instructors have an important role in advancing nursing students to achieve the program objectives. Nursing student perceptions about the characteristics of an effective clinical instructors may help programs improve clinical instruction. As such, the purpose of this study was to understand the characteristics perceived by students to define an effective clinical instructor. METHODS: In this qualitative descriptive study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with undergraduate and postgraduate nursing students. The sample was purposefully selected. MAXQDA software was used for the content analysis. The codes were organized into subcategories and consolidated into categories. RESULTS: Data saturation was reached with twelve participants, including seven women and five men, between 21 and 36 years of age. General and special characteristics were the two main categories that emerged from the data. These categories were defined by nine subcategories including internal motivation, professional acceptability, clinical competency, teaching skill, clinical experience, values, being a faculty member, appropriate appearance, and communication skills. CONCLUSIONS: Effective clinical instructors have a specific characteristics identified by student. The most important characteristics of effective clinical instructors were related to communication and teaching skills, internal motivation, and professional appearance. More research is necessary to determine the relationship between the characteristics, instructor competency, and student learning outcomes.

Factors Affecting the Desire to Undergo Cosmetic Procedures Among the Nurses of Kermanshah, Iran: A Cross-Sectional Study.

The number of people undergoing cosmetic procedures (CP) has been growing around the world in recent years. The aim of this study was to determine factors involved in the desire of nurses to undergo CP. A total of 360 nurses were recruited in this cross-sectional study. Stratified random sampling was used to select the samples. The data were collected using the Social Appearance Anxiety Scale and a questionnaire addressing social factors affecting the desire to undergo CP. More than half of the nurses (56.7%) were willing. Gender, social factors, and social appearance anxiety (SAA) were associated with undergoing CP. The results of logistic regression indicated that women were four times more willing to undergo CP than men, and for each unit increase in SAA score, the odds of desiring to undergo CP increased by 1.04. The Hosmer-Lemeshow test confirmed the goodness-of-fit of the regression model. Moreover, 3 independent variables of gender, SAA, and social factors were powerful predictors of the desire to undergo CP that could explain 39.9%-53.6% of changes in the desire to undergo CP. Further studies are needed to investigate the amount of CP and motivations to undergo CP in nurses.

Role of perceived heart risk factors by outpatient population in predicting cardiovascular risk.

Introduction: Regarding the expanding population in developing countries who are at risk for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), identification and management of effective factors are important in reducing the risk of CVDs. So, the present study aimed to assess the role of perceived heart risk factors (PHRFs) in the prediction of cardiovascular risk among outpatient patients. Methods: The samples of this cross-sectional study included 150 outpatient patients who attend the clinic of Imam Reza hospital during October-December 2016. The participants were completed the Perceived Heart Risk Factors Scale (PHRFS) and Cardiovascular Risk Assessment Questionnaire (CRAQ). Data analyzed through Pearson correlation and multiple regression analyses. Results: Based on the findings, 28%, 40%, 22.7%, and 9.3% of patients were low, medium, high, and severely high-risk, respectively. The strongest predictors of the cardiovascular risk were physiological (ß=-0.273; P=0.004), psychological (ß=0.236; P=0.020), and biological risk factors (ß=0.209; P=0.016), respectively. In addition, the strongest predictor of the lifestyle risk was physiological risk factors (ß=-0.264; P=0.007). Other variables do not play a significant role in predict the lifestyle risk (P>0.05). Our model was able to explain 9.2% of cardiovascular risk variance and 5.7% of cardiovascular risk caused by lifestyle variance. Conclusion: The higher patients' perception about biological and psychological risk factors is concerned as an alarm for increased cardiovascular risk while higher perception about physiological risk factors is associated with reduced cardiovascular risk caused by lifestyle and total cardiovascular risk. The programs reducing cardiovascular risk should target the high-risk groups to save cost and time.

Exploring the perceived factors that affect self-medication among nursing students: a qualitative study.

BACKGROUND: Self-medication is the use of one or more medications without physician's diagnosis, opinion, or prescription and supervision, which includes the use of herbal or chemical drugs. Todays, self-medication is one of the biggest socio-health and economic problems among nursing students of various societies, including Iran, and because this issue can affected by contextual factors, this study aimed to explore the perceived factors that affect self-medication among nursing students. METHODS: In this qualitative study, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 11 nursing students. The transcript of each interview was reviewed several times and classified into main categories and sub-categories by content analysis. To evaluate this study, Guba and Lincoln's four criteria, including credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability were considered for trustworthiness. RESULTS: After analyzing the qualitative content of the interviews, four main categories, including educational backgrounds, nature of the disease, access to the media, and beliefs and personal experiences, and ten subcategories, including contact with clinical environment, relative knowledge about medications, simplicity of the disease, recurrence of the disease, influence of the media, use of the internet, believing in own knowledge, positive experiences of traditional medicine, and using own and others' experiences, were extracted. CONCLUSIONS: It seems that, having a relative awareness about various diseases and medications, which is sometimes associated with taking a few educational courses with an internship, creates a false confidence in student for self-medication and prescribing drugs to others. It would be beneficial if the education system and associated tutors could inform the students about the possible consequences of this issue. By knowing the internal and subjective factors that influence the self-medication, this arbitrary practice can be largely prevented.