Description

Nursing students are typically provided a nursing syllabus that requires study or training, as well as professional values and ethics. This means working independently and persistently, with full dedication toward the profession, and with credible legal autonomy. The nursing profession refers to a career of service, responding to the health needs of society at the level of the individual, the family, and the community, in scenarios of both sound health and illnesses. The objectives of the nursing profession consist in the provision of care, assistance, rehabilitation, disease prevention, and the promotion of health, including assisting a physician in the treatment of disease, all of which depend on the application of specialized nursing knowledge. In studying for the nursing profession in Thailand, students begin their practice during the second semester of their second year of undergraduate education and continue to practice in their third and fourth year. The students practice three days a week in a hospital.

After high school students have graduated, they can apply to nursing school, where they will study basic science, for example fundamental anatomy and fundamental biochemistry in the first year. In the second year, the nursing students have to continue to study basic nursing science during the first semester and practice the fundamentals of nursing with patients in the hospital during the second semester. The third year, they begin to study and practice specific areas of nursing science, such as mental health and psychiatric nursing, community health nursing, and nursing for the family and midwifery. At the end of their studies, fourth-year students practice in the hospital more than they study in the classroom and must pass nursing competency assessment and a licensing examination.

Clinical-Class Nursing Students

Stress poses an obstacle to concentration in problem solving and decision-making, and obstructs other necessary abilities and is thus a serious factor in terms of students’ learning. There is now evidence that makes it unmistakably clear those students are under a great deal of stress from their programs of study in the health professions, which can adversely affect their health as they study. As an example, it has been found that more than half of clinical-class nursing students between their second and fourth years of study are severely stressed. Nonetheless, it has been found that 24.5% of students with scores at an abnormal level from screening were suffering from depression. Furthermore, it has been found that nearly one in every three students enrolled in the public-health sciences have moderate stress levels.

As regards those students that are studying in the nursing professions, it has been found that they experience stress levels at a higher level than students enrolled in other branches of the health sciences. In fact, it has been suggested that the stress imposed on nursing students in many universities is greater than the stress borne by all other university students. In addition, it has been found that some nursing students, third-year nursing students in particular, time to time have had to deal with a lot of problems that impact their mental health. Further, studies of the stresses imposed upon first-year nursing students have shown that these students experience high stress levels. The same studies also show that the stress borne by nursing students is not related to the methods of stress management currently being used. A possible explanation is that those with high stress levels are continuing to use methods of stress management that are inappropriate, so that they are not able to manage their stress as much as they should. Consequently, their stress levels remain high. Students that use proper problem-solving methods, on the other hand, succeed in reducing their stress loads. These outcomes are in agreement with a previous study, in which it was found that student stress was not related to confronting stress.

There are many causes of stress in nursing students. From a study conducted by Shaban et al. it was found that the causes of stress in nursing students were rooted in their learning environment, especially in the work that was being assigned to them in the various subject areas of their study. As regards the cause of stress in Thai nursing students, it was found that it was their nursing coursework, and especially courses in the practice of nursing that were creating this stress. These students did not yet understand the system of work applicable to the field of nursing; nonetheless, they were being quizzed by their instructors to determine how much they knew already.

This impact was being especially felt by nursing students that were entering the field of practical nursing for the first time. It was found that there was stress from performing procedures and becoming prepared with the necessary knowledge for use in the patient wards. They felt stressed from the patient-ward environment and from their need to connect and communicate with the senior nurses, and the patients and relatives of the patients. They were forced to endure stress from having the role of instructor in the patient wards and from the effect it was having on their own states of health and on their living.

Behavioral-Therapy Program

There are many ways to reduce stress. In one study, it was found that enhancing the imagination took place in conjunction with a cognitive and behavioral-therapy program, in which it was found that there are many ways of easing stress, each of which can effectively lower the stress load being borne by an individual. Imagination uses the ability of the subconscious to imagine for example a peaceful natural fantasy or natural images where the practitioner finds herself or himself in a relaxing and peaceful body. While imagining images, the practitioner should breathe evenly and deeply, and focus on the details of the images created, such as their colors, sizes, texture, sounds, odors, and surroundings. When other ideas interfere, the practitioner should draw her or his attention back to those details. Sriwatanakul stated that relaxation through the use of imagination techniques (autogenic training) is an applied science derived from the principle of hypnosis of Dr. Schultz, which he first developed in 1932.