Emily Patey, senior nursing major, has wanted to be a nurse since she was a child.
"Really, I just grew up wanting to be a nurse. The motivation behind it was probably helping people," she said.
Linda Finch, associate dean for The University of Memphis' undergraduate nursing program, co-authored "The Effect of Nursing Students' Clinical Experiences on Probability of Graduation," an academic paper that found students like Patey will be more encouraged to pursue the nursing field if they undergo a negative clinical experience.
"We looked at how the more discomfort there was in the role, the more interested they were in staying in school to get their degree," Birnbaum said.
Rhodes College associate professor of commerce and business, Dee Birnbaum, co-authored the paper, which was presented in early March at the Association for Marketing and Health Care Research Meeting in Park City, Utah.
What they discovered was contrary to their expectations. The researchers thought if the students saw conditions like poor staffing with patients not receiving the care they needed they would be less likely to graduate as a nurse because they would be discouraged. Researchers found, however, the more problems students witnessed, the more likely they were to graduate as nurses.
"The results showed a negative clinical experience increased the rate of graduation, which was really unexpected," Birnbaum said.
The study was conducted over the course of three years, from 2006 to 2009, and solely included interviews of nursing students from The U of M Loewenberg School of Nursing. It consisted of asking 263 students about the clinicals they participated in their first semester.
Two main motivations for people to pursue nursing surfaced in the interviews. One was the motivation of helping people, like Patey described, and the other was the motivation of a stable job, good income and job availability.
"We have, for years, had students come into nursing for helping people or the humanitarianism viewpoint. They are now coming in for stability of the job," Finch said. "So to have it identified by students, it showed while there are other reasons, there are clearly two opposite ends of the spectrum: people who want to help and people who are in it for money, stability and mobility."
Through clinical experience, nursing students see nursing is not always perfect and apply the theoretical as well as conceptual knowledge they've acquired in the classroom to real life situations and patients, she said.
"They see nurses are scientists, artists and humans - no one person fits a mold. Every patient is an individual. Every nurse must go into their toolkit to find the right way to care for that particular patient. It's not as easy as choosing the right answer on a test. Real life issues require critical thinking and reasoning," Finch said.
Patey said she's learned more though participating in hands-on clinical experiences than she has in class.
"I can see that maybe people will not realize how much work it is, but the thing is you have eight patients. They don't realize how hard the job is until they have clinicals," she said.
The nursing students interviewed for the study answered questions about the nature of their clinicals, the staff, the workload expected of the student and how the clinical made the student feel about nursing as a career. Finch and Birnbaum later checked to see which participants had graduated, and are in an ongoing phase of the data analysis.
"When you think about it, if they see the situation is desperate their help is needed and the ones who want a good career are also needed. The worse the conditions were the more they wanted to stay and do something in the field," Birnbaum said.
While the healthcare field is expanding with 313,000 more jobs for nurses in 2011, there is a shortage of educators who can teach the field of nursing, Birnbaum said. In 2011, graduate schools rejected 67,563 applicants, according to Birnbaum. She said though there is a high demand for health care professionals, there is a lack of educators to fill the shortage.
The National Council of State Boards of Nursing announced Monday that Loewenberg School of Nursing received a score of 98.39 percent on the National Council of Licensure Examination, a test all nurses must take to get a license to practice in the state.
"I would say to the graduating seniors this spring as their associate dean of nursing to never lose sight of the core values: caring, diversity, integrity and leadership," Finch said. "And to always remember that patients and their safety is the number one consideration. We are servants to the public. Nursing is a challenging but rewarding career."
