Evaluation of Nursing Management Internship: A Mixed Methods Study

Introduction: Enabling nursing students in clinical skills such as management is only possible through creating enough opportunities for obtaining and practicing such skills in a clinical environment. Therefore, given the importance of this issue and lack of information and backgrounds on the subject, this study aimed to evaluate management internship of nursing students through both qualitative and quantitative methods. Methods: This concurrent mixed methods study was conducted in nursing faculty of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in 2011 and data were gathered in two phases, qualitative and quantitative. 80 nursing students were selected in the quantitative phase (65 females and 15 males) who completed a management internship evaluation questionnaire whose validity had been verified earlier (r=0.8). At the same time, data about internship procedures were collected for the qualitative phase by interviewing 18 nursing students. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed by descriptive methods and qualitative content analysis respectively. Results: Findings of the quantitative phase showed that students became mostly proficient in routine activities such as writing a daily report and delivery and change in wards while had little proficiency in special and non-routine activities such as applying for monthly necessary equipment and participating in staff on-the-job training. In the qualitative phase, 48 conceptual codes were extracted. These experiences were classified into two categories of learning experiences and internship problems. Learning experiences were classified into five subcategories: organization, coordination, control, assessment and planning, and recording and reporting. Internship problems were classified into three subcategories: instructor-related problems, nature of internship training, and the internship environment. Conclusion:The results demonstrated that although students mostly became proficient in routine activities, they had never experienced some of these activities. This study also showed that there are barriers to implementation of such internships in terms of the nature, instructor, and environment which will have impacts on achieving internship objectives