Abstract
Soft skills are vital for the successful execution of professional skills in the nursing profession. Soft skills are described as a combination of personal habits, attitudes, attributes, and social abilities that improve an individual’s interactions and job performance. Nursing education should train students to become highly functional professional nurses. The demands and stressors within the nursing profession call for the cultivation and enhancement of soft skills. These skills will ease the existing high rate of burnout, emotional distress, and discourage staff from leaving the nursing profession. Early preparation of student nurses into professional nurses with soft skills will promote quality care, patient satisfaction, and career development. In addition to facilitating knowledge acquisition and technical competency, there is a need to determine ways of enhancing the student nurses’ soft skills. . Literature shows that nursing education pays more attention to developing hard skills but focuses less on the soft skills that contribute to the success of healthcare establishments and the nurses themselves. This background urged the researcher to explore the nurse educators’ perceptions of teaching soft skills at a higher education institution in Johannesburg and how the nurse educators incorporate soft skills in their teaching.
The purpose of this study was to gain an in-depth understanding of nurse educators’ perceptions of teaching soft skills at a higher education institution in Johannesburg, in order to provide recommendations to facilitate the incorporation of soft skills in nursing education.
Research Design: The researcher applied a qualitative, exploratory, descriptive, and contextual research design to explore and describe the nurse educators’ perceptions of teaching soft skills at a higher education institution in Johannesburg. The researcher also applied the paradigmatic perspective of constructivism in this study.
Research method: A purposive sampling method was applied for the selection of participants. Participants were nurse educators at the higher education institution in Johannesburg. The study consisted of two phases. In phase one of the study, the researcher explored and described the nurse educators’ perceptions of teaching soft skills, and most importantly, the second question: How do you incorporate soft skills in your teaching was posed to the participants. This was achieved by conducting online semi-structured individual interviews to collect data until data saturation occurred with
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participant twelve. During the interviews, the researcher gathered field notes to support the data, and interviews were audio-recorded with the consent of the participants. Tesch’s open coding method was used for data analysis. The measures of trustworthiness; namely, credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability, were adhered to throughout the research process. Ethical matters were taken into consideration by the researcher, and the ethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice were maintained. In phase two of the study, the researcher developed recommendations in line with the themes and categories that were identified.
The findings of the study indicate a central theme, that participants perceive teaching of soft skills at the higher education institution to be necessary and require nurse educators to be intentional about it. Four themes that emerged from the findings were described as: soft skill teaching is perceived by nurse educators as strengthening personal ability to interact and relate better with others; Teaching of soft skills relates to enhancing professional conduct; Soft skills teaching require nurse educators to incorporate different strategies to the methods of teaching and learning and lastly teaching of soft skills should integrate assessment.
In conclusion, soft skill teaching is perceived to lead to producing nurse graduates with sound personal attributes that allow them to establish and maintain effective work relations, while practicing within legal professional prescripts. The researcher described the strengths, limitations, conclusions and reflections of the study in relation to nursing education, practice and research.
Keywords: Nurse educator, Perceptions, Teaching, Soft Skills