Denise Mann

Anxiety is persistent feeling throughout the nursing school experience for the majority of students. Kleehammer, Hart and Keck conducted an anxiety study in which they found that nursing students face high levels of anxiety especially concerning “the initial clinical experience on a unit and fear of making mistakes” (1990). When student nurses suffer from anxiety, it decreases their ability to learn and retain information, as well as decreasing confidence in their ability to function autonomously. This study was designed to measure anxiety in a study group of 14 students participating in a mentored experience for their first clinical and a control group of 22 students in a traditional clinical setting.

The “Clinical Experience Assessment Form” (Kleehammer, 1990), will be used to measure the student’s anxiety level in this study. It was given to both the study and control groups at the beginning and end of the clinical experiences. This is an 18 item Likert-type scale using a 5 point range from strongly disagree to strongly agree. In addition, there is one open-ended qualitative question. Internal consistency reliability has been established through a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and has been measured at .82.

Upon analyzing the quantitative data, it was found that mentored students report significantly less anxiety using hospital equipment. Non-mentored students reported a median score of three (neutral anxiety) and students in traditional programs reported a median score of four (agree that they experienced anxiety). The data reported no significant change in anxiety levels over the course of the semester for the two groups. After assessment of the quantitative data, there was a marked difference between the study and control group in student anxiety related to nurse interactions. Students in the mentored group showed significantly less anxiety about nurse interactions. Of the non-mentored students, 50% made comments about anxiety related to nurse interactions on the pre-assessment and 63% on the post-assessment. From these findings, it is recommended that mentor programs be further studied and implemented for students, especially during their initial clinical experience as it has shown to decrease student’s anxiety levels in interacting with the staff.