Infection control in clinical placements: experiences of nursing and midwifery students

Abstract

Poor practice in clinical placements can have a negative impact on student learning and practice and may therefore have implications for the practice of future nurses and midwives. In order to maintain patient safety, there needs to be more support for students who wish to identify poor practice.

Student nurses' experiences of infection prevention and control during clinical placements

“…However, students' comments, particularly in relation to isolation precautions, demonstrated the complexity of implementing IPC in the clinical setting identified by other authors 10,15 . Overall the findings support the conclusions of earlier researchers who explored experiences of IPC in the clinical setting 14,15 . Qualified staff provided poor role models for student nurses.…”

“…However, as in previous work 14 , they were often highly critical of other staff, especially doctors. These findings are in line with earlier work that established a culture of blame between different groups of staff in relation to IPC 16 .…”

“…Other studies exploring student nurses' experiences of IPC in the clinical setting have been small scale and restricted to a single university 14,15 . The study reported here obtained data from a much larger sample recruited nationally.…”

“…Questions were developed from existing studies 8,9,10,14 augmented by the researchers' expertise in IPC. Student nurses were presented with a range of different possible lapses in IPC and asked to indicate whether they had never been witnessed, witnessed occasionally (once or twice), witnessed often (every week) or very often (every day).…”

“…An interview study with forty student nurses revealed examples of good practice, especially when qualified nurses performed aseptic procedures, but poor practice was more frequently reported: failure to clean equipment and change PPE between patients, unsafe handling of intravenous lines and urinary catheters and poor compliance with hand hygiene protocols 14 . Student nurses in this study benchmarked quality of IPC witnessed in clinical areas against practice taught by university teachers.…”