Abstract
Caring is developed in student nurses by learning to care in a caring environment, emulating
caring behaviours, and having caring relationships with the health team and facilitators of
learning. International concerns about uncaring nursing have resulted in the clinical
environment in which student nurses are supposed to learn to care, to not be conducive to
cultivating caring nurses.
Clinical instructors have close contact with student nurses during clinical placement and are
positioned ideally to care for students, so that they, in turn, can learn to care for patients. The
purpose of this study was to investigate and examine the perceptions of student nurses of
clinical instructor caring at a private nursing education institution in South Africa. A descriptive,
comparative, cross-sectional and correlational quantitative research design was used to
describe the perceptions of student nurses of clinical instructor caring at the institution, and to
determine and examine the relationships between the perceptions and the years of formal
nursing education successfully completed, frequency of clinical instructor contact and age of
the student nurses.
The total accessible population size was N = 347, comprising N = 148 junior student nurses
and N = 199 senior student nurses. Convenience sampling was used. The acceptance rate
was n = 122 (82%) and n = 168 (85%) for the junior- and senior student nurses respectively.
A structured self-administered questionnaire was used to collect the data, including the
Nursing Student Perceptions of Instructor Caring (NSPIC) instrument. Descriptive statistics
analysis, hypothesis testing, and reliability testing was conducted.
The findings revealed that respondents had a positive perception of their clinical instructors’
caring. Statistical relationships could not be found between the years of formal nursing
education successfully completed, the frequency of contact with a clinical instructor, the ages
of the respondents and their perceptions of clinical instructor caring. Reliability testing revealed
that the NSPIC was reliable if one item each from two of the subscales were removed.
The findings of this study contribute towards the knowledge of student perceptions of clinical
instructor caring, specifically from a South African private nursing education perspective, and
could contribute towards further research on this important nursing education theme.
Furthermore, the findings could be used in theory development, in support of a theory, and in
designing a model of clinical instructor caring in the future.
M.Cur.