Counselling as a Correlate of Internship Training of Nursing Students in the Fako Health District of the Southwest Region of Cameroon

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of counselling support on the internship training of nursing students in the Fako Health District of the Southwest Region Cameroon. Counselling support entails the provision of special advice and guidance from more experienced colleagues to percept and implement individualized patient care. It also addresses emotional, social, and personal guidance and advice in the learning environment. Specifically, it sought to establish whether there were any links between counselling and the training of students. The sequential explanatory design with the mixed method was adopted for the study. A sample of 345, including 325 second, third and fourth year students and 20 guidance counsellors were considered for the study. This sample was purposefully and conveniently selected. Data was collected quantitatively and qualitatively using questionnaires, focus group discussion guides and interviews. Data was entered using Epidata verse on 3.1 and exploratory statistics were ran to identify questionable entries, inconsistency in responses and others. Descriptive statistics were used to present distributions between and within subsets using frequency distributions, percentages and multiple response sets. Hypotheses were verified using binary logistic regression analysis and omnibus test of model coefficient, the likelihood ratio test and Wald statistics were used to appraise the degree of significance of relationships between psychosocial support indicators and internship training of nursing students. Here the Cox and Snell R Square were used to determine the explanatory power. Thematic analyses were used to analyse focus group discussions and interview data. Findings showed that counselling support was a necessary ingredient in internship training of nurses. The findings showed that, counselling 2=37.047 P=0.000 had a predictive power of 13.9 . Overall, 94.5 of students emphasized the importance of counselling during training. It was concluded that given the high levels of challenges and stressors associated with training, counselling should be considered as an unavoidable variable in elevating supportive, healthy and psychologically stable learning environments for students during training. It is therefore recommended that there should be an effective provision of counselling support through the creation of more emotionally welcoming spaces in the academic environment, more mentorship programs, a clinical environment of personal support which is sensitive to student's psychosocial needs being a critical factor that will transform student's anti academic attitude towards learning, periodic debriefing and counseling sessions that will assist the students to socialize to become a professional, which will also allay their anxiety levels during their educational training and thus increase academic performance. Dr. Obenebob Ayukosok | Dr. Etta Roland Daru "Counselling as a Correlate of Internship Training of Nursing Students in the Fako Health District of the Southwest Region of Cameroon" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-7 | Issue-5 , October 2023, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd59883.pdf Paper Url: https://www.ijtsrd.com/medicine/nursing/59883/counselling-as-a-correlate-of-internship-training-of-nursing-students-in-the-fako-health-district-of-the-southwest-region-of-cameroon/dr-obenebob-ayukosok