JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The benefits of clinical support are evident in various mentorship, preceptorship or clinical supervision models. Poor collaboration between lecturers and clinical staff, negative feelings, lack of confidence about clinical teaching, large student intakes coupled with core clinical demands, create negative attitudes toward teaching and this poses a huge challenge to midwifery students who are expected become competent in the process.

Objective:

To review the evidence on interventions that strengthen the clinical support of midwifery students globally.

Methods:

This review will follow the Arksey and O’Malley framework (2005). The search strategy will include primary studies searched in electronic databases such as EbscoHost (CINAHL, MEDLINE and Health Source: Nursing/Academic edition), PubMed, Google and Google Scholar using keywords such as midwifery students, midwifery education and clinical support. The search will include articles from the “cited by” search as well as citations from the reference list of included articles. All title-screened articles will be exported to an endnote library and duplicate studies will be removed. Two independent reviewers will concurrently carry out the abstract and full text article screening using eligibility criteria. Websites such as the World Health Organization, South African Nursing Council, National department of health and other relevant policies and guidelines, will also be included in this study. Extracted data will highlight the aims, the geographical setting, and the level of training, the intervention outcomes, and the most relevant and most significant findings. A mixed methods quality appraisal will be included in this study. A narrative summary of data extracted will be analyzed using content analysis.

Results:

Interventions to strengthen the clinical support of midwifery students in practice will be extracted from this review and data will be analyzed to develop a comprehensive programme for clinical mentorship.

Conclusions:

It is expected that this study will contribute to midwifery education by identifying quality evidence on clinical support interventions available to midwifery students globally; and identify best practice methods, procedures or intervention that can be used to develop a midwifery mentorship programme.