Abstract
Introduction: The prevalence of ethical issues encountered in clinical practice calls for ethical training to prepare emerging nurses with the ability to deal with ethical dilemmas. Ethical competence is a key component that the South African Nursing Council compels each nursing professional to have. Hence, the undergraduate nursing curricula include the acquisition of ethical competence. Ethical competence allows student nurses to make ethical decisions in clinical practice. A classroom case review and discussions have been a common approach to facilitate ethical competence, but little is known about how to facilitate ethical competence using a simulation-based learning (SBL) approach. As a result, nursing educators and clinical nurse preceptors advocate for SBL as a proposed model for facilitating ethical competence in clinical nursing education and training. The purpose of this study was to identify and explore ways to facilitate student nurses’ ethical competence and provide recommendations to facilitate ethical competence through SBL at a higher education institution in Johannesburg. Design applied: A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive and contextual research design was used to explore and describe ways to facilitate student nurses’ ethical competence through SBL at a higher education institution in Johannesburg. Recommendations were also provided on how student nurses’ ethical competence can be facilitated. The study population was nurse educators teaching ethics, and nurse educators and clinical nursing preceptors using SBL to facilitate student nurses’ ethical competence at a selected higher education institution in Johannesburg. Purposive sampling was used to select the sample for the study. Methods applied: The researcher used in-depth, online, individual interviews to collect data until data saturation was reached with participant number nine. The interviews were audio-recorded while the researcher was writing field notes. Giorgi’s thematic descriptive data analysis method was employed for data analyses. Credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability were used as measures of trustworthiness. The researcher also applied the principle of autonomy, the principle...
M.Cur.