Collaboration guidelines for a designated nursing education institution and associated healthcare services

Abstract

Nursing students face challenges with integrating theoretical knowledge from their education into real clinical settings due to differences between the nursing theory and clinical practices in healthcare-services. This theory-practice gap is common in nursing education, and collaboration between nursing education institution staff and healthcare service counterparts is crucial to address this issue. The study aimed to create context-specific guidelines that foster better collaboration and reduce the theory-practice gap during nursing students' clinical training. In the first phase of the study, an integrative literature review was done, and draft guidelines were compiled. In the second phase of the study, a descriptive qualitative design was used through four focus group discussions of the drafted guidelines with a purposively selected sample of nine theoretical lecturers and 10 clinical facilitators. The data were thematically analysed; categories and sub-categories were identified and described with excerpts from the transcriptions of the interviews; and discussed with literature. The draft set of collaboration guidelines was refined and contextualised with the input of the participants. A final set of context-specific guidelines to improve the collaboration between the theoretical lecturers of the designated nursing education institution and the clinical facilitators of the associated healthcare services to narrow the theory-practise gap during the clinical training of nursing students was described. Context-specific guidelines were developed under the headings: Maintain a healthcare service and nursing education institution partnership, Maintain bilateral communication, Maintain cooperation between theoretical lecturers and clinical facilitators in evidence-based practice, Intensify innovation in teaching, learning, and assessment processes, and Build an environment conducive to theory-practice integration.