Confounding factors affecting the clinical decision-making of nursing and midwifery students post-pandemic COVID-19: cross-sectional study in Jordan

Background The ability of a nurse to make effective clinical decisions is the most important factor that can affect the treatment quality. However, several factors can affect the ability of nursing and midwifery students to make effective clinical decisions.Objectives This study aims to identify the confounding factors that may affect the clinical decision making of nurses and thus patient outcomes after the COVID-19 pandemic in Jordan.Methods A descriptive cross-sectional design was employed in this study. An online self-administered questionnaire was distributed to 269 nursing and midwifery students selected through purposive sampling, 224 of whom completed the questionnaire. The valid and reliable nursing decision-making instrument, which consisted of 24 items, was employed to gather the data, and descriptive statistics and simple linear regression were employed for the data analysis. Data was collected from November to the end of December 2022.Results Among the respondents, 72.8% were female, and the average age was 20.79 years (SD = 1.44). The vast majority of the respondents (94.6%) was unmarried, and 74.1% were pursuing a nursing degree. The simple linear regression analysis showed that clinical decision making had a negative and significant relationship with social media usage of an average of 6 h a day (beta=-0.085). Moreover, the male nursing students obtained lower clinical decision-making scores (beta= -0.408) compared with the female nursing students.Conclusion Social media usage and gender have a considerable effect on the clinical decision making of the nursing and midwifery students. Therefore, the confounding factors that can affect the clinical decision making of nurses should be discussed further, and strategies to address such factors should be implemented.