Navigating concerns about students’ suitability: Exploring nurse teachers’ perspectives in aqualitative interview study using vignettes

Abstract

Assessing students’ suitability for the nursing profession is the nurse teachers’ responsibilities. Clinical placements serve as typ-ical arenas for conducting such assessments. Nurse teachers collaborate closely with nurse mentors during student assessments,and they also receive student-related concerns from mentors. This study aims to explore nurse teachers’ experiences with suit-ability assessments in clinical placement, including how nurse teachers handle and assess suitability concerns reported by nursementors. This study is an explorative qualitative study. Focus group interviews was conducted, using a semi-structured interviewguide and vignettes. The study included 15 nurse teachers from three universities in Norway who conduct student follow-up inclinical placement. The study was reported in accordance with the SRQP checklist. The analysis identified three themes: 1) intro-ducing questions about suitability has a high threshold, 2) building a solid case for ‘the system’ and 3) responding critically toconcerns from the practice field. Suitability assessments impact nurse teachers on a personal level. Nurse teachers express acritical attitude toward reports originating from the practice field. They want to investigate concerns independently and assiststudents in moving forward. The effort put into building solid cases sometimes leads to critical views of the system.