Patients' experiences with nursing care offered by student nurses

Patient-centred care in contemporary nursing refers to prioritising the patient and their experience through communication, discussion of treatment options, potential outcomes and possible psychological effects. These are the expectations of a professional nurse practicing in the 21st century. Proper nursing care, therefore, should take into account the experiences of patients during the care process in the health facility. In teaching hospitals, while the focus of care is the patient, attention is sometimes diverted to the nursing students rather than on the patients who are undergoing care at the hands of both the nursing professionals and students. The study was thus designed to explore and describe the experiences of patients nursed by student nurses in a teaching hospital; identify patterns in the experiences of patients receiving patient care from student nurses; conceptualise these experiences within a framework; and analyse aspects of the experiences that may need further attention for the training of student nurses. Three main themes were discovered: methods of identification of student nurses by patients; positive and negative perceptions of student nurses by patients.