Undergraduate student nurses' experiences of their community placements

Background: Community nursing placements play an increasingly important part in the undergraduate nursing students learning experience as a greater proportion of health care delivery is set to migrate to community care settings. Therefore, nursing education programmes and health services must ensure that student nurses are exposed to high quality community placements that provide suitable learning experiences for students to acquire the skills and knowledge required for the health service of the future. Objectives: This qualitative evidence synthesis examines undergraduate nursing students' experiences of community nursing placements from 1996 to date. Design: Qualitative Evidence Synthesis, Thematic synthesis. Data sources: CINHAL, EMBASE, ProQuest, Medline, Embase, Scopus, Psycinfo. Review methods: A systematic search across electronic databases was carried out to identify all available existing evidence relevant to the search question. Data was extracted and synthesised through thematic synthesis to identify and interpret emerging themes. Results: Six qualitative studies were included in the data, from these three themes were identified. The first of these highlighted the important influence of the community nursing teams and mentor on the students' placement experience. The second theme highlights the students' professional development as a result of their community placements and finally the third theme explores the students' perceptions of the essence of caring in the community. Conclusion: The community provides valuable learning experiences of nursing from an alternative perspective, enhancing professional development and understanding of the nurse patient relationship. Mentorship and inclusion in teams are key factors that influence students' experiences and this working environment is useful for teaching about holistic care that is person and family centered. Role modeling is enhanced by the pace and proximity of the mentoring relationship.