Patient attitudes to nursing students in urology outpatients

Urological conditions are increasingly being managed in an outpatient setting and this environment can offer valuable training in urology nursing particularly with the emergence of nurse‐led clinics. Patient attitudes to nursing students may influence the effectiveness of these training opportunities. We set out to determine patient attitudes to nursing students in urology outpatients and whether opinions are related to patient age, ethnicity or prior exposure to students. Questionnaires were given to all patients attending urology outpatient clinics until 500 completed questionnaires were collected. The questionnaire consisted of nine questions concerning patient demographics and attitudes towards the presence of nursing students. Patients were also asked to grade their comfort with a student’s presence from 0, indicating very comfortable, to 10, indicating very uncomfortable. Only 12% of patients had some degree of objection to the presence of student nurses and most patients (72%) had no preference as to the student gender. When means were derived for patients’ acceptance of the presence of student nurses, there was a significantly lower mean score, indicating more acceptance in patients aged over 30 years compared with those aged under 30 years (p ≤ 0·0001). This also applied to those who spoke English as their first language compared with those who did not (p = 0·063), and to those who had previously been exposed to nursing students compared with those with no exposure (p = 0·0002). Overall, patients were comfortable with nursing students attending their urological outpatient assessment. The patient groups that objected the most were those under the age of 30 years, those who did not speak English as their first language and those with no prior exposure to students.