Nurses' Image perceived by Student Nurses before and after their First Clinical Practice

첫 임상실습 전.후 간호학생이 지각한 간호사 이미지

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify changes in nurses' image of student nurses before and after their first clinical practice. Method: Study samples were composed of 78 student nurses who were from nursing dept. of one college in G city. All participants had their first clinical practice for 4 weeks at two general hospitals in Gwangju. The internal consistency of the total scale was Cronbach's $\alpha$= .883. Results: After the first clinical practice, the mean score of nurses' image in general was lower than that of nurses' image before the clinical practice. In five subcategories, before the first clinical practice, professionalism and expertness were the highest followed by role performance, vision of a career, and temperature as a nurse in order but after the first clinical practice, professionalism was the highest score followed by expertness, temperature as a nurse, role performance, vision of a career in the mean scores of nurses' image. Conclusion: Based upon these findings, clinical practice will play an important role in improving role performance and vision of a nursing career for student nurses, so nursing administrators should make efforts to improve image of nurses in a variety of practice.