Challenges of Nurse Tutor Utilization of the Teaching Aids

Introduction: Nursing is the largest healthcare profession in Malawi with more than 11,000 registered nurses (RNs), nurse technicians and midwives (NTM) practicing in hospitals and other settings like nursing colleges nationwide. Student preparation is mostly done by nursing tutors in all the nursing colleges using numerous types of teaching aids. Methods: Descriptive exploratory design which utilized both qualitative and sequential quantitative methods was applied to Iterated Purposive Probability Sampling (IPPS) of 10 nursing colleges in Malawi. This was done to 129 students and 82 nurse tutors in two structured questionnaires, 40 nurse tutors in-depth interviews and 10 students focus groups. There were 32 variables for the teaching aids under five ranked Likert scale and the Cronbach’s Alpha was found to be 0.932 without standardisation and it was 0.952 after standard-disation. Results: Although nurse tutors show that they use manikins to teach (0.011 < p = 0.05), students seem not to agree on the utilization of the manikins during teaching both in class and at the clinical area (0.05; p = 0.05). There is also increased discrepancy between students and nurse tutors on internet utilization as the teaching aid as the Beta Coefficient value was (B = 0.202) for the nurse tutors and (B = 1.061) for the students basing on their experience. Use of patient as a teaching aid is very common in Malawi and both the nurse tutors and students agree that it is the realistic and best way in teaching and has a strong binary logistic regression with a model outcome of (OR = 1.431; 95%CI (0.890 ± 2.304); p = 0.139). Conclusion: There is a need to develop the teaching strategies that would be conducive with the current scarcity of the teaching aids. Use of patients if ethically followed remains the most effective and efficient teaching aid in developing countries.