Guidelines to enhance the human caring attributes amongst the undergraduate nursing students and nurse graduates in KwaZulu-Natal

Field: Nursing (Health Sciences)

The nursing profession needs caring individuals. Graduating nurses who interrelate with others in an empathetic and compassionate manner is obligatory for nursing to uphold the image of being a caring profession. Not only nursing’s reputation is at stake, but also having caring or uncaring nurses does have financial bearing in healthcare. South Africa is witnessing a sharp increase in medical malpractice litigation as patients increasingly become aware of their rights in a setting of an overburdened health system with limited resources. The consequences of increased litigation are a further reduction in the state’s ability to finance health care because of large pay-outs and a continuing increase in malpractice premiums in the private sector. Aim The aim of this study was to critically analyse the role played by theoretical and clinical learning experiences, in influencing the development of human caring attributes among undergraduate nursing students and newly graduated professional nurses (less than five years of experience) in the province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in order to establish clear guidelines that could be used by lecturers to enhance human caring attributes among the nursing students. Methodology The convergent mixed method design (Qualitative + Quantitative) was used in the current study. This method allowed the researcher to use concurrent timing to implement the qualitative and quantitative strands during the same research process, prioritise both methods equally, but kept the strands independent and only mixed the quantitative and qualitative results during the overall interpretation. The quantitative aspect enabled the researcher to gather information from undergraduate nursing students and newly graduated professional nurses (less than five years of experience) from both selected KZN College of Nursing (KZNCN) and University of Technology (UoT) using the Caring Behaviour Inventory Tool after the researcher received permission from the author. The qualitative aspect allowed the researcher to gather information from the newly graduated professional nurses (less than five years of experience) and nursing students’ from KZNCN and UoT, understanding of the concept human caring, to explore the intrinsic and extrinsic factors related to the development of human caring attributes from their perspectives and to determine their experiences in both the theory and the clinical setting that contributed to the development of human caring attributes through semi-structured in-depth interviews. Focus group discussions with nurse educators from the selected KZNCN and UoT as well as nurse managers and nursing students from DUT and KZNCN practice, also enabled the researcher to gather some rich information from these participants. The quantitative data was analysed using version 25.0 of the Statistical Package of Social Sciences and the qualitative data was analysed using Tech’s method of data analysis. Findings The quantitative data showed that the nursing students and newly graduated professional nurses had a clear idea regarding the constituents of caring in nursing. The findings identified a caring nurse as being giving the patient information, so that he/ she can make a decision, supporting the patient, giving good physical care, giving instructions or teaching the patients, treating patient information confidentially, making the patient physically or emotional comfortable, helping to reduce the patients’ pain, encouraging the patient to call if there are problems, showing respect for the patient and giving good physical care. The qualitative findings of the current study revealed that there was a unanimous agreement amongst the nurses irrespective of their professional ranks about the understanding of the concept human caring. These findings also revealed that the lack of human and material resources, unconducive working environment and lack of management support impact negatively on the quality of patient care as well as nursing students’ integration of theory into practice. The researcher also established clear guidelines that can be used by lecturers to enhance human caring attributes among the nursing students. Recommendations for implementation and evaluation of the effectiveness of the developed guidelines were suggested for future research.