Health care students' personal experiences and coping with bullying in clinical training

Abstract

Previous studies show that health care students have experienced bullying by nursing staff in clinical training. Although these studies provide plenty of information considering the manifestation and consequences of bullying on students, there is a gap of knowledge on how health care students' cope with bullying. In addition, previous studies seem to have focused only on the experiences of nursing and midwifery students. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study exploring the bullying experiences of Finnish health care students (n=41) representing two Universities of Applied Sciences. In order to provide information for faculties of health care on bullying intervention and prevention strategies, this study aimed at describing health care students' experiences and coping with bullying in clinical training. Based on previous study findings, an electronic semi-structured questionnaire was developed for the data collection. The qualitative data was analysed using inductive content analysis. The results show that the students experienced verbal and non-verbal bullying in clinical training. In addition to psychological and physical symptoms, bullying also decreased the students' learning, their studying motivation and their professional engagement. One reason why some students did not share their bullying experiences with their teachers and clinical instructors was their idea that sharing their experiences would be useless. On the other hand, students who did share their experiences with a teacher or a clinical instructor usually received emotional support, information, and help in the form of bullying intervention. The results of this study suggest that faculties of health care need to develop action plans against bullying in co-operation with clinical training sites in order to ensure students' learning and professional engagement. In the future, it is suggested that research is focused on factors preventing and contributing to bullying towards health care students.

Keywords: Bullying; Clinical instructors; Clinical training; Health care staff; Health care students.