Nurse education today
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Nurse education today · Jul 2016
Rocking the boat - nursing students' stories of moral courage: A qualitative descriptive study.
This paper profiles a qualitative study that examined how undergraduate nursing students demonstrate moral courage when confronted with clinical situations that negatively impact the quality of patient care and/or patient experience and the factors that encouraged or inhibited their willingness to speak up when they identified poor practice. ⋯ This study demonstrates the importance of undergraduate nursing students identifying as patient advocates, the multitude of consequences students face when questioning the practice of a registered nurse, and the influence supervising nurses and clinical facilitators have on a student's decisions to intervene to protect patient safety. Further research is required to examine the factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that influence nursing students' moral courage and their decisions to intervene when poor practice is witnessed.