Description

Nursing is a noble profession that necessitates a loving heart to provide compassionate care. Nurses are the “front line” workers in most healthcare organizations, and their contributions are identified as critical to achieving development objectives and providing good quality of care. Globally, in the 21st century, the demand for nursing is growing. However, the availability of nursing professionals per population is below the acceptable limits. Nurses have more possibilities for unique and constructive relationships with children, families, and individuals around them than other healthcare workers. While nursing is an important part of every country's society, it has been difficult to reinforce its status as a health profession by identifying it with the conventional role of motherhood.

Nursing Profession

Although the nursing profession has faced various cultural challenges, including a negative attitude that has discouraged individuals from entering the field, a positive attitude is the consequence of people appreciating the value of nursing as a discipline. If a person wants to adapt to a profession and maintain a fruitful working life, he or she must have a positive attitude while choosing a career; having a good attitude toward the career plays a key role in both employee accomplishment and professional growth.

Most nursing students avoid devoting their limited time to the profession because their perception of nursing is restricted to bedside treatment and drug administration, obscuring the highly educated and competent nurses who play a critical role in the healthcare system. Some nursing students may graduate with an attitude that prevents them from accomplishing their work as expected; this is a global concern, not just a problem in one country. Because students' attitude toward nursing is a key indicator of their interest, motivation, and happiness with their profession, they should have a wide range of ideas and views about the nursing field.

As nursing students develop a positive attitude towards their profession, the quality of care provided to patients will improve; patients will be satisfied, which will lead to increased work satisfaction for the nurse, which will assist to improve the career's quality. However, available pieces of evidence showed that the favorable attitude of nursing students toward the nursing profession is unsatisfactory and varied across countries which range from 42 to 99%.

Studies showed the attitude of nursing students towards their profession is affected by different factors. This includes the socio-demographic characteristics of participants like gender, age, and residence of students. Moreover, year of study, nursing students' reasons for enrollment in the nursing school, subordination to physicians, satisfaction with the nursing department, and having families with a positive reaction to the student's enrollment in the nursing school have been shown to have an impact on the nursing students' attitude towards the nursing profession.

Even though few studies have been done on nursing students' views throughout the world, previous studies suggest that more focus is still required. In Ethiopia little is known about nursing students’ attitudes toward their profession.

Many nursing students have difficulty acquiring anatomy and physiology clinical skills, and they suffer when applying their anatomical knowledge in clinical situations. This difficulty is presumably due to a lack of learning opportunities to grasp the human body structure in three dimensions and to experience the integration of basic anatomical knowledge with nursing practice. Furthermore, perceptions of the difficulty of learning anatomy and physiology and the complexity of the content of these subjects are burdensome to learners. Since evidence based on anatomy and physiology is required to provide higher quality nursing care, nursing students need to overcome these learning burdens and difficulties and acquire accurate knowledge of anatomy and physiology.

Nursing Care

Accurate assessment based on patients’ diseases, symptoms, and complaints is crucial to nursing care, and it is necessary to improve nurses’ knowledge of anatomy and physiology and other biological science-related subjects to expand their assessment abilities. Thus, the education should be effective enough to allow basic knowledge of anatomy and physiology to be applied in nursing practice. Additionally, to realize practical and effective anatomy and physiology education and develop nurses’ advanced nursing, clinical reasoning, and judgment skills, teachers with nursing qualifications must be involved in anatomy and physiology education to grasp and utilize the knowledge from a nursing perspective. To improve education in this way, it is necessary to explore highly useful educational challenges that integrate nursing science and anatomy and physiology, as well as effective ways to involve qualified nurses in the teaching of anatomy and physiology.

In Japanese nursing universities, the schedule and content of lectures on anatomy and physiology are left to the discretion of the university or the course instructor. According to previous studies that have analyzed the anatomy and physiology syllabi, there are significant differences among lectures and faculty members in charge of the courses depending on the university. Furthermore, some universities do not include faculty members with nursing licenses as class instructors, but instead ask only physicians and biologists to teach the courses. This situation highlights the difficulty of teaching anatomy and physiology systematically in nursing.

Effective teaching and learning methods must be provided for nursing professionals to acquire the necessary knowledge of anatomy and physiology to fully understand the clinical problems, diseases, and pathological processes of patients and develop competence to apply this knowledge to clinical practice from a nursing perspective. To do so, it is necessary to identify the problems in anatomy and physiology education at nursing universities and innovations currently being used, as well as consider ways of further improving teaching strategies.

Although many studies have clarified the problems in anatomy and physiology education from the perspective of students, very few studies have clarified problems from the perspective of faculty members. Additionally, the effectiveness of teaching methods based on various educational theories, such as flipped learning and small group learning, in anatomy and physiology education has been examined in many studies. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has descriptively clarified the educational theories’ aims from the perspective of the teachers themselves.

Therefore, this study aimed to highlight the difficulties and innovative methods in anatomy and physiology education from the perspective of faculty members in charge of anatomy and physiology education in Japanese nursing universities.