The Effect of Narrative Writing on Communication Skills of Nursing Students

Introduction: Narrative writing describes a particular clinical event or situation. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of narrative writing on nursing students’ communication skills in teaching hospitals of Golestan University of Medical Sciences. Methods: This interventional study, with a pretest-posttest design, was conducted in 2015 on 58 student nurse interns of 7th and 8th semesters in Golestan University of Medical Sciences. Subjects were selected using census method and then randomly divided into an intervention and a control group. Both groups completed the self-assessment nursing student-patient communication skills questionnaire before and after the intervention. The questionnaire had already been translated and its validity and reliability had been confirmed. The students in the intervention group were asked to describe their feelings and experiences during eight weeks of internship (at the end of each week) about clinical events as “the worst communication experience with patients and accompaniers, the best communication experience with patients and accompaniers, the most difficult moment, and vice versa”. They were required to write their experiences in the form of narrative based on Gibbs’s model.  Paired t-test, Mann–Whitney, Wilcoxon and independent t tests were used for data analysis. Results: The t-test showed no statistical significant difference between mean scores of therapeutic communication skills in the intervention group (172.9±12.66) and the control group (162.31±21.66) after the intervention (P=0.07). The mean scores of clinical communication skills were not significantly different before and after the intervention (P>0.05). Conclusion: The results showed that although narrative writing improved the score of therapeutic communication skills, but the difference was not statistically significant. It seems that narrative writing in clinical education of nursing students could improve clinical communication skills; however, more research is necessary to further examine this issue.