Challenges of nurse tutors’ classroom and clinical performance when teaching

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Nursing is a dual profession that involves teaching both in class and at the clinical area. Nurse tutors meet a lot of challenges in their profession through their cognitive, affective and psychomotor nursing performance. The aim of this paper is to determine the challenges of nurse tutor clinical affective, cognitive and psychomotor performance in Malawi. METHODS: Mixed methods design was employed. Quantitatively, 129 students and 82 nurse tutors randomly selected were involved for the five ranked Likert Scale questionnaire, and 42 nurse tutors were involved in in-depth. While 8 focus group discussions were conducted in 8 nursing colleges. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used quantitatively for predictive variable of nurse tutor work experience and student study experience to compare with the dependent variables from the 39 cognitive, affective and psychomotor attributes. RESULTS: Both nurse tutors and students are not impressed with nurse tutors cognitive, affective and psychomotor performance during teaching. There is inadequate clinical orientation to students [OR ≤ 0.302; 95%CI (0.096 ± 2.955); p ≥ 0.042] and inadequate funding from college administration [OR ≤ 1.013; 95%CI (0.271 ± 3.793); p ≥ 0.985] as a result it creates much pressure on teaching. CONCLUSION: There is a need to develop an effective teaching strategy that would be conducive and easy to use for the limited resource environments in Malawi.