Prelicensure Nursing Students’ Anxiety in the Mental Health Clinical Setting: A Qualitative Study

• Prelicensure nursing students’ anxiety is high prior to entering the mental health clinical setting, which can negatively impact their success. • Students’ anxiety is often invoked by common and preventable stressors that could be avoided through proper training. • An educational intervention on anxiety-reducing strategies aided in reducing students’ anxiety in the mental health clinical setting. • It is imperative that prelicensure nursing students engage in robust clinical orientations to reduce their anxiety, which may include education on self-led anxiety-reducing strategies, experiential learning opportunities, and activities related to stigma reduction towards mental illness stigma. • More research exploring a formalized and universal model that nursing faculty can use to properly prepare prelicensure nursing students for mental health clinical is needed. Clinical placement anxiety is a common phenomenon for prelicensure nursing students, known to have various deleterious effects. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of information regarding how to manage prelicensure nursing students ‘anxiety in the mental health clinical setting. Thirty-seven prelicensure nursing students participated in this descriptive phenomenological research study. Students completed three journal entries throughout their mental health clinical rotation, including before and after engaging in an educational intervention on anxiety-reducing strategies. Three major themes were derived from the aggregate data, including perceptions of anxiety, triggers for anxiety , and coping with anxiety . The results support the need to improve curricula to adequately prepare and manage students’ anxiety, which is often present in the mental health clinical setting. More research is needed to identify strategies that help reduce clinical placement anxiety.