Components of the nursing role as perceived by first-year nursing students

Background: Identifying and acquiring the nursing role is key to the development of nurses' professional identity. Understanding nursing students' perceptions in this regard will enable nursing educators to choose teaching strategies that lead to positive development of their students' professional identity. Objectives: To describe how nursing students perceive the different components of the nursing role at the beginning of the nursing degree. Design: Cross-sectional, descriptive, observational study. Participants/settings: 106 first-year nursing students at the University of Huelva, Spain. Methods: Data on social and academic variables and variables relating to the instrumental and expressive roles were collected via an adapted, pilot-tested questionnaire assessed by experts. Results: For participants, caregiving is the core of the nursing role in the clinical setting, including both technical execution and patient care aspects. They highlighted the disease prevention, health promotion, restoration, and education profiles of nurses rather than their teaching, professional, and technical profiles. They were acquainted with the concept of postgraduate professional development, but were unaware of the academic pathways leading to it. They considered nurses to be decision-makers, who are nevertheless subordinate to doctors. Conclusions: Students did not consider nursing to be an autonomous profession, although they highlighted its decision-making capacity. They placed greater emphasis on the traditional profile of primary care nurses than on their technical profile, and were able to identify the members of the multidisciplinary healthcare team.