Background and Purpose: Nursing school graduates seldom chose psychiatric department as their beginning career. Clinical internship trainings are the most vivid life experience for nursing students during their school education. Therefore, the process of clinical internship program might play some role to influence psychiatric nursing attitudes. In this study, we investigated the impacts of cllinical performance and related factors on psychiatric nursing attitudes’ changes in a nursing student internship program. In addition, we design several questions to explore nursing students’ preferences for their future nursing careers. Method: This study adopted a prospective one group pretest posttest design to collect data of 170 eligible nursing students with one-month clinical internship from September 2009 to January 2010.at a large-size psychiatry hospital in the middle of Taiwan area. The instruments are self-administered questionnaires for nusing students to fill in their perceived performances at each end of four training stages, and a before-after questionnaire to fill in their psychiatric nursing attitudes. Meanwile, the clinical instructors were also asked to fill in a questionnaire regarding the performance of their nursing students at ach end of four training stages. We employed SPSS (version 12.0) as our software to have statistical inferences.
Result: Most nursing students were still not sure whether psychiatric department were their favoriate at the staring careers. However, they inclined to take the job if there were a nursing position open in the psychiatric department. Furthermore, most respondents tended not to change their careers if they got involved in psychiatric nursing. After the implementation of the clinical internship program, there were 65% of 170 nursing students having positive changes toward psychiatric nursing attitudes. The average attitude score of total nursing students increased significantly from 54.35 to 56.66 (p=0.000). Binomial Logistic regression analysis showed the improvement of psychiatric nursing attitude was positively correlated with personality with internal locus of control and students’ past academic performance ranking between 31% and 70%, compared to those ranking after 70%; On the other hand, the improvement of psychiatric nursing attitude was negatively correlated with students’ performance at the second stage of the internship program. Conclusion: There are 65% of 170 nursing students having positive changes toward psychiatric nursing attitudes right after four weeks of psychiatric internship. The nursing student tends to positive changes of attitudes toward the psychiatric department if she possesses a internal locus of control personality, past academic performance ranking between 31% and 70%, or perceives a unsatisfied performance at the secomd stage of the internship program. Hopefully, the results of this study can servce as a reference for improving the psychiatric nursing attitude for stakeholders, as well as for enhancing the willingness of nuring manpower toward the psychiatric department.
