The Study of the Nursing Students' Lived Experience of Clinical Practice at the Intensive Care Unit

간호학생의 중환자실 임상실습 체험 연구

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the perception of nursing students' on-site clinical experience at intensive care unit(ICU), which will help on developing fundamental tool to enhance the effect of their clinical practice. Method: Van Manens hermeneutic-phenomenological method has been used to analyze the data. Participants consisted of 74 third-year nursing students who performed the clinical practice at an ICU in C university hospital. The students got the group interviews and kept the clinical diaries. Data was collected from series of group interviews and contents of the students clinical diaries. Result: Major concerns related to students clinical practice were found as follows : "being nervous about unfamiliar machines and situations", "being frustrated about the patients", "feeling of helplessness", "being stupefied from witnessing a death", "realizing the importance of health", "realizing individual patient's precious value through family's love", "realizing the importance of treating a patient as humanbein g", "realizing the differences between theory and practice", "modelizing two aspects of nursing: professional and personal", "readiness to become a capable nurse". Conclusion: We are able to obtain in-depth understandings about the nursing students lived experience of clinical practice at the ICU. Based upon this, there is a need to develop a better nursing intervention enhance the effectiveness of the nursing students clinical practice.