This is an international research collaboration between four universities in three countries:
- Faculty of Social and Health Sciences, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway
- Department of Laboratory Medicine, Clinical Research Unit, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden
- Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department of Public Health and Nursing, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
- School of Nursing, Kitasato University, Kanagawa, Japan
Since 11 March 2020, the world has experienced a pandemic by SARS-cov-2 that causes COVID-19 disease. Mankind has rarely in modern times faced a similar threat with such a communicable viral infection. Staff working in health-care settings are at risk of contracting the viral infection when caring for patients with COVID-19. Nurses, doctors, and allied healthcare professionals have contracted and died from the viral disease after providing care for patients with COVID-19. As by November 2020 the International Council of Nurses (ICN) confirmed that 1,500 nurses have died due to COVID-19, which are the same number of nurses who died under the entire World War I. The number of nurses who have died due to COVID-19 may be as high as 20,000 persons. Mid-March 2020 the universities closed. Both teachers and students were instructed to work from home. The clinical practice was gravely impacted. All theoretical education was switched to digital teaching and all examinations took place at home instead of at the universities. We wanted to invetsigate how the changed learning situation might have influenced the students. The main aim of the study was to investigate how nursing students in Norway and Japan during the pandemic at the point of graduation reported their:
- competence regarding ‘Nursing Care’, ‘Value-based Nursing Care’, ‘Medical and Technical Care’, ‘Care Pedagogics’, ‘Documentation and Administration of Nursing Care’ and ‘Development, Leadership and Organisation of Nursing Care’ and if they experienced that their competence had been affected by the study situation during the pandemic (‘Not at all’, ‘Yes, for the better’ or ‘Yes, for the worse’),
- knowledge about SARS-Cov-2, care of patients suffering from COVID-19 and knowledge about basic hygiene and infection control,
- degree of anxiety of being infected by SARS-Cov2 or infecting other persons,
- degree of anxiety that the educational situation would not have given them sufficient competence to start working as a registered nurse
We also wanted to investigate the students' perceptions regarding vaccination against Covid-19.
The aim is further to compare all the above-mentioned outcomes between the Norwegian and the Japanese nursing students.
We also translated the Nurse Professional Competence Scale Short Form that was used for the data collection to Japanese and has performed a validation study to establish a Japanese version of the scale.
