Aim: To explore nursing students’ experiences of encountering patients’ existential concerns during clinical placements. Background: Existential concerns about the purpose of life, illness, and death are integral to human experience, and are common in healthcare. Illness disrupts life, intensifying these concerns and leaving patients in need of support. Nursing students often encounter these concerns during clinical placements, but their experiences in clinical settings are sparsely studied. Methods: Eleven second-year nursing students from a Swedish university participated in lifeworld interviews during clinical placements. These interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using reflective lifeworld research. Results: Encountering patients’ existential concerns is described as a process of becoming a nurse through uncertainty and shared experiences with patients. Encountering patients’ existential concerns is a transformative and emotional process. Despite theoretical preparation, these uncertain situations represent a challenge, as the tension between emotional engagement and clinical demands complicates their responses. These patient interactions foster compassion and deepen understanding of life's fragility, underscoring nursing's complexity—balancing competence with emotional presence. Encountering patients’ existential concerns is essential for students’ learning. This is further elaborated on in four constituents. Conclusions: Encountering patients’ existential concerns challenges students but creates personal and professional growth. Nursing students engage deeply in care, experiencing compassion that can evoke feelings of hopelessness and anxiety. They need educational support and preceptors’ guidance to reflect on these emotional encounters. Integrating existential reflection, self-compassion, and structured support helps them become professional and compassionate nurses. 

Aim

This study aims to describe the existential reflections of patients in need of hospital care. Illness that requires hospitalisation can evoke existential reflections–such as uncertainty and altered self-perception–which confront patients with their vulnerability. This study seeks to provide insights into how patients experience and navigate these reflections, highlighting the importance of including existential reflections in caring.

Design

A phenomenological study using a reflective lifeworld research approach was conducted, following the consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research checklist.

Method

Twelve patients were interviewed, and data were analysed using the reflective lifeworld research approach.

Ethics

The study was approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority and adhered to the Helsinki Declaration.

Findings

The essence is described as being in a vulnerable state while navigating towards existential security, as patients confront mortality and shifting roles. Feeling alone, waiting alone in a hospital room heightens emotional processing, amplifying reflections on illness and personal responsibility. Despite uncertainty, patients draw strength from past experiences, guiding them towards a new reality. Existential reflections emerge both indirectly and through direct contemplation.

Conclusions

A caring relationship that acknowledges existential reflections is crucial for the patient's possibility to adapt and live authentically. Prioritising existential reflections in health care enhances patients' well-being, resilience and purpose.

Den 19–22 oktober 2022, nästan 2½ år och en covid-pandemi senare änplanerat, var det dags för NETNEPs konferens i idylliska Sitges i Spanien.Konferensen, som vanligen ordnas vart annat år, hade denna gång temat ”From education to impact: Transforming nursing and midwifery education”

Background

Previous studies have shown that the rapid transition to emergency remote teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic was challenging for healthcare teachers in many ways. This sudden change made them face ethical dilemmas that challenged their values and ethical competence.

Research aim

This study aimed to explore and gain a deeper understanding of the ethical dilemmas healthcare teachers faced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Research design

This was an inductive qualitative study using a hermeneutic approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed thematically.

Participants and research context

Healthcare teachers (n = 20) from eight universities and universities of applied sciences in the Nordic and Baltic countries participated.

Ethical considerations

This study was based on the research ethics of the Norwegian National Research Ethics Committee for Medicine and Health Sciences and approved by the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research.

Findings

Healthcare teachers faced several ethical dilemmas due to restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis revealed three main themes: How should I deal with students’ ill-being, and what can I as a teacher do?; What can I demand from myself and my students, what is good teaching?; How do I manage the heavy workload and everyone’s needs, and who gets my time?

Conclusions

This study highlights the importance of healthcare teachers’ continuous need for pedagogic and didactic education, especially considering new technology and ethical issues. During the pandemic, the ethical consequences of remote teaching became evident. Ethical values and ethical dilemmas should be addressed in healthcare education programmes at different levels, especially in teacher education programmes. In the coming years, remote teaching will grow. Therefore, we need more research on this issue from an ethical perspective on its possible consequences for students and healthcare teachers.

Nursing is a complicated and multifaceted profession that sets high demands in preparing nursing students for the profession. In today's education, the emphasis is often on knowledge and skills, that is, epistemology. In caring science another approach is sought, an approach based on human sciences in which knowledge will serve a more profound understanding, that is, the ontology. Consequently, the question of what this 'understanding' in clinical education is and how it is promoted in clinical nursing education becomes important to clarify. Therefore, the aim here is to explicate the phenomenon of understanding in clinical education as experienced by third-year undergraduate nursing students ready for graduation. This study, with a hermeneutic approach, is based on a secondary analysis of focus group interviews with undergraduate nursing students. The analytical expansion of the original material suggests three interrelated themes that illuminate the phenomenon of understanding in clinical education. These findings are deepened and enriched through philosophical abstraction. In the process of understanding, episteme, techne and phronesis can be viewed as inherent parts of the structure of thought in nursing. The perspective advanced in this study adds new aspects to the phenomenon of understanding and its meaning and significance in the dynamic process of formation and becoming in clinical education. The focus in clinical nursing education should be on learning reflective, critical thinking and the ways of being a nurse, rather than drilling students on particular skills. In the rapidly changing world of the 21st century, an understanding-based education is needed as a more meaningful and authentic approach. Therefore, an ontological turn in nursing education, through which the main focus shifts from a traditional epistemology to an epistemology in the service of ontology, is suggested. Further studies are needed in the development and implementation of an understanding-based, interpretative education in nursing.