Clinical Practice Readiness of Nursing Graduates

Abstract

Nurses form the majority of the healthcare workers, despite that, nurses continue to face challenges in terms of availability, distribution, retention. In order to evade nurses’ global shortage, the total number of nursing graduates needs to be increased by 8% per year on average. However, data showed that graduates are often unprepared to work in the complex field of clinical practice, where increased patient acuity and shorter hospital stays, combined with a lack of deep learning in our academic nursing programs, have exacerbated the competency crisis. Furthermore, nursing graduates face challenges that impede nursing students' clinical practice readiness, such as a lack of clinical learning materials, a shortage of well-qualified and skilled nursing faculty in terms of both quality and quantity, and inadequately equipped nursing skill laboratories. Besides, lack of experience, poor nurse-physician interactions, inadequate communication, leadership, and management skills are all common stressors for new graduates. However, this problem is underappreciated and skewed demand and supply of nursing manpower necessitated it more than before; thus it has to be addressed at both national and international platforms, to rectify the problem for quality of care and patient safety.