A Survey on nursing student’s opinions toward nursing and reasons for giving it up

Joolaee S (MSc.), Mehrdad N (MSc.), Bohrani N (MSc.). Abstract

Introduction: There has been a considerable interest shown recently in student nurse attrition. Despite a long history of researches in this problem, attrition rates remain a cause for concern.

Material and methods: This article describes a cross-sectional study to identify the nursing students’ opinion toward “nursing “attrition” and “main reasons for attrition” in Iran in 2004. Material and Methods: A 300 sample of students selected by stratified sampling filled a researcher made questionnaire. Data were analyzed by SPSS statistical package.

Results: Results showed that only 18% of respondents have positive opinion toward nursing and most of them explained that they have had a decision to change their major (64%) or/and attrition (52%) during their study. The main reasons for attrition from the Iranian nursing students' point of view in this study were: poor social setting, discrepancy between pre-entry perceptions of nursing and the real fact of it, staff and health care team negative attitudes and inappropriate clinical climate, social gap between physicians and nurses, and poor salary of graduates or financial factors. There was no significant statistical difference between the opinions of students of various semesters of education.

 Conclusion: Then results suggest the need to do a better job of preparing potential students for what they will encounter in nursing prior to admission and to monitor very closely how students are responding program through their study. Nursing needs to receive considerable media attention including interviews with practicing nurses who describe aspects of the profession and the work of nursing that they do. It seems that the students who were disillusioned with nursing and nurses, the majority of whom were in university nursing programs, were not aware of this situation and were not expecting to find this in the profession that they had chosen to pursue. The almost universal recommendation is to provide a very realistic picture of nursing in information sessions for interested potential students confirm this. Additionally health care managers should consider nursing more and apply policies, which make nurses feel more valued in the community.

 Key words: nursing profession, nursing attrition, nursing student points of view