Abstract:

Background: In the future ten years, Macao will face the critical challenge of short of nurse manpower. How to arrange clinical teaching, which directly affect the quality of nursing student.
Objective: To explore the roles of school teacher and clinical preceptor in nursing students’clinical placement in Macau. And to assess the nursing students’learning result.
Design: A prospective quantitative study design was adopted.
Settings: In a teaching hospital in Macau.
Participants: In Macao in 2009, there are 60 nursing students were enrolled the research. They are year one undergraduate bachelor students come from Macao Polytechnic Institute, School of Health Sciences. They had the practicum of fundamental nursing in surgical wards or medical wards in the hospital for 2 weeks.
Methods: The SPSS/PC 16.0 software package was used for the statistical analysis. T-test and chi-square test was used to identify significant differences (p< 0.05) between the multiple groups. 60 nursing students are divided into 10 practice groups, each group include 6 nursing students in one clinical ward with 35 beds. Two fixed professional teachers are responsibility to instruct one group. The school teacher - student ratio is 1:6. School teacher will go to the ward and guide one group of nursing student for 8 hours every week. The clinical preceptor is a clinical nurse. The clinical preceptor -student ratio is 1:3. The Clinical preceptors guide one group of nursing student for 8 hours every day, total 5 day every week. Both school teacher and clinical preceptors will identify learning needs of individual students and help student make a realistic plan of learning activities, offer clinical teaching and supervision. Finally they will apply "Clinical Practice Assessment Form" to assess student’s performance in the last week. "Clinical Practice Assessment Form" included three areas, professional attitude ( score range from 0 to 10), Knowledge (score range from 0 to 34), Skills ( score range from 0 to 56). Total Score range from 0 to 100. 88 to 100 are excellent, credit A. 73 to 83 are good, credit B. Less than 50 are credit F, the student will fail the subject. Teaches will consider students’ Self Assessment, and the finally score is the average score of school teacher and clinical preceptors.
Results: 60 students all pass the Clinical Practice Assessment. The average score is 76.80+5.34. The average assessment scores given by of the school teacher, clinical preceptor and students themselves are 81.20+7.42, 72.42+4.74, 75.12+3.72. There are statistically significant (X2=28.545, P=0.000 ,Df=2. NPar Tests and Kruskal-Wallis Test ). To compare the score given by the school teacher and clinical preceptor, the score given by the school teacher is higher than the clinical preceptor, T=5.725, p=0.000, 95% CI=5.705-11.853，Independent Samples T-Test)

Conclusion: Pairs of teachers and assessment model can enhance nursing students’ learning results. The school teacher coordinate with the clinical preceptors, which will benefit the student’s theory and clinical practice closely integrated, and strongly support student to overcome difficulties in clinical placement. However the assessment system will be revised because of bias and not enough objectivity.

Keywords:

Clinical teaching, Assessment, Nursing students, clinical placement, Macau.