Background
Professionalism is a multidimensional and evolving structure with has socio-cultural information that affects patient satisfaction, and health care outcomes. An important part of nurses' professional behavior is formed during their student years and through education and learning. The aim of this study was assessing the professionalism in internship nursing student.
Methods
This cross-sectional study was conducted in Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. The data collection instrument was a nursing professionalism questionnaire that was completed by 2 instructors for 70 final-year nursing students in the internship. Method of sampling used non-probability convenience sampling. The data were analyzed using SPSS, version 16, for Windows (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Descriptive statistics (mean and percentage) were used to describe demographic characteristics and mean scores of professionalisms and its dimensions. Histograms and the bias-kurtosis and Shapiro–Wilk test were used to evaluate the normality. Comparisons between the two groups were made by independent samples t-test. To compare more groups, the Kruskal–Walli’s test was used.
Result
The findings of this study show that the mean score of professionalism was 75.26(±10.5), the highest mean was related to the dimension of behavior based on professional values and norms (80.36 ± 9.93) and the lowest mean was related to the dimension of professional interactions (75.00 ± 13.72). Students with perfect regular participation in their internship had a significantly higher professionalism score than other students (P-value = .0001). There was no significant relationship between students' gender and score professionalism (P < .571).
Conclusion
Given the importance of familiarity of undergraduate students with the concepts of professionalism in theory, providing practical training of these concepts through experienced instructors and role models can be an effective step in developing professionalism in nurses after their graduation.
