Attitudes Towards Learning Communication Skills Among University Nursing Students

A major skill of nurses for achieving high-quality care is their ability to communicate effectively with patients, and this has been considered very valuable in the patient healing process. Objectives: To assess the learning attitudes of university nursing students towards communication skills and to find out the association of demographic characteristics of students with their attitude level. Methods: This cross-sectional analytical study design was conducted on 230 student nurses studying in a four-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. Permissions were obtained from the Ethical Review Committee and the Head of the Department for data collection. Data were collected via non-probability purposive sampling. Communication Skills Attitudes Scale was used to assess the attitude of university nursing students. Student's t-test and One-way analysis of variation were used to identify the differences in Positive Attitude Scores and Negative Attitude Scores between demographic variables. Results: Most of the study participants (77.4%) were male and 94% belonged to the age group 18-25 years. There was a significant difference in the Positive Attitude Score between gender and education of the students with p-values of 0.009 and 0.015 respectively. Furthermore, education level is the only variable that shows a significant association with a Negative Attitude Score with a p-value<0.0001. Conclusions: It was concluded that female students had more positive attitudes compared to their counterparts. Third-year students had a more positive attitude compared to other study years.