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 = .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.
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