Abstract
Background: Caring is the core of nursing and should be cultivated in student nurses.
However, there are serious concerns about the caring concern in the clinical environment
and in nursing education. Clinical instructors are ideally positioned to care for student
nurses so that they in turn, can learn to care for their patients.
Methods: A descriptive, comparative, cross-sectional and correlational quantitative
research design with convenience sampling was conducted to describe the perceptions of
junior student nurses (n ¼ 148) and senior student nurses (n ¼ 168) regarding clinical
instructor caring. A structured self administered questionnaire using the Nursing Student
Perceptions of Instructor Caring (NSPIC) (Wade & Kasper, 2006) was used. Descriptive
statistics and hypotheses testing using parametric and non parametric methods were
conducted. The reliability of the NSPIC was determined...