School performance and stability of student nurses

Abstract

Owing to a number of factors the selection of student nurses in hospitals appears to present specific problems for the nursing administrator. In the first place, nursing applicants are, with few exceptions, recruited straight from school. Consequently very little information is available in order to assess the suitability of the applicant to nursing. Furthermore, at the time of her application, the interests, ambitions and career aspirations of the scholar are still in a process of being shaped. Therefore the applicant herself is probably not in a position to make a commited career decision at this stage. Moreover, the selection ratio (i.e. the number of applicants in relation to the number of posts) is usually not very favourable. This has the result that nursing administrators cannot screen applicants effectively - most of those who apply are accepted for training owing to the shortage of staff.