Abstract
M.Cur. (Nursing Education)
Caring is known to be the core concept of the nursing profession. Student nurses are expected to demonstrate caring in the clinical learning environment, while caring for the patients. For the student nurses to practise and demonstrate caring, they need to observe it from the clinical facilitators. Student nurses are allocated a clinical facilitator, who will be responsible and accountable for their teaching and learning in the clinical learning environment. Clinical facilitators have the pivotal responsibility to demonstrate a learning environment that is caring to student nurses. Student nurses learn by seeing or experiencing what their clinical facilitators are demonstrating. When the student nurses emulate caring, this can be beneficial to patients as they will be nursed by caring student nurses that are in the process of becoming professional nurses. Student nurses need to acquire this caring attribute while they are still training in order to be able to render caring, quality nursing care. A caring clinical learning environment influences student nurses to demonstrate caring. Student nurses reported that there was a lack of support, they were made to feel unwelcome by the clinical facilitators, poor performance of skills was experienced in the wards and there was poor communication between clinical facilitators and nursing unit staff. Therefore, that affected their motivation for caring. The research aims were to gain an understanding of experiences of student nurses regarding caring by the clinical facilitators with a view to develop recommendations to support them at an academic hospital. A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive and contextual design was used. Data was collected through an in-depth focus group and phenomenological interviews that focused on the research question: “What are your experiences of caring regarding the clinical facilitators?”. The researcher interviewed 22 participants, who were second year student nurses, and two themes emerged from the study findings. Themes were identified as follows: when student nurses experienced caring, it motivated them to be better nurses and succeed in their studies; also, student nurses experienced initial effective caring, but caring diminished as they progressed to second year...