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Abstract: New graduate nurses are often stressed in the early months of their first position following graduation. The researcher examined whether new graduate nurses were ready for the workplace or if there a gap between nursing education and clinical skills, causing new graduates to feel less confident and new supervisors/employers to be frustrated with the graduates' lack of readiness to be part of the nursing team. The concern was whether the new graduates had acquired the necessary clinical skills while in their nursing education programs in order for them to be a full team member upon graduation. The model used to examine both important areas of education and practice was Benner's (1984) model of skill acquisition. Thirty-three new graduates with less than one year of experience participated in the study.
Key Words: Clinical Skills Development; Clinical Skills of New Graduates; Nursing Expertise; Benner's Model of Skill Acquisition
Introduction
ransition from nursing student to Registered Nurse has proven to be a difficult transition. Some new graduate nurses are not adequately prepared to assume the role of a nurse without more clinical experience. New graduate nurses face many different challenges and enormous pressure to meet professional expectations.
Health care consumers have expectations as to how their care should be provided which can have a negative effect on new graduate nurses whose skills are not yet efficient. Additionally administration pressures nurses to provide efficient, effective and profitable care, which places pressure on nursing programs to provide work-ready graduates. This research reviewed nursing education and the readiness of clinical skills of new graduate nurses.
Expertise in clinical nursing skills is necessary to provide quality care. From an educational standpoint, the amount of knowledge needed to care for patients in a safe and
effective manner requires new graduate nurses to embrace additional learning resources outside of the traditional learning environments. According to Dadgaran, Parvizy and Peyrovi (2012), the clinical education a nurse receives is predictive of how a nurse will perform in the clinical setting.
Researchers found the education of nurses did not always prepare them for the different areas of the hospital and there is a difference in what the students learn and how that education is used in an active clinical environment. Nursing students do not select...