Background: Nursing students experience numerous personal, academic, and practice-related stressors, impacting their mental health. Nursing programs often contribute to student stress and should incorporate strategies to support students' mental health. Self-care has the potential to enhance students' ability to manage current stressors and to build capacity for addressing future stress and burnout; however, the concept has been limitedly integrated into nursing education.
Objectives: To examine students' responses to a self-care assignment integrated into core nursing coursework.
Design: Cross-sectional study using an online survey.
Settings: An accelerated two-year undergraduate nursing program in Western Canada.
Participants: Undergraduate nursing students in first- and second-year of a two-year program.
Methods: A 16-question survey, including closed- and open-ended response fields was developed by the research team. Survey questions were grounded in Bloom's Cognitive, Psychomotor, and Affective learning domains to comprehensively examine the impact of the assignment on students' learning and self-care capacity.
Results: 89 participants completed the survey (49% response rate). Participants' increase in self-care practices pre- and post-assignment was statistically significant (p = 0.023). Results further demonstrate that students' knowledge of self-care and capacity to identify and manage stressors were enhanced. Participants reported that overall the assignment supported their well-being. However, some participants described that aspects of the assignment detracted from well-being, including challenges with grading and feelings of guilt when not practicing self-care.
Conclusions: A self-care assignment is an effective strategy for nursing educators to foster students' capacity to cope with stressors.
Keywords: Curriculum development; Educational techniques; Nursing education; Self-care; Student mental health; Survey.
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