Identifying the difficulties male student nurses experience while providing care

This cross-sectional and descriptive study was conducted to determine the difficulties male student nurses experience while providing care. The research sample consisted of 300 male student nurses who started clinical practice in 7 universities in the Central Anatolia Region and allowed the implementation of the study. The research was conducted between 01.10.2019 / 01.11.2019. Written permission from the ethics committee, institutions, and verbal permission from male student nurses were obtained in order to conduct the study. The research data were collected by using the demographic information form prepared by the researcher in line with the literature and the form the difficulties experienced by the students while providing care. As one of the numbers and percentage tests, the Chi-square tests were used to analyze the data. The mean age of the students participating in the research was 21.30 ± 2.00, 38.3% were in the 2nd grade, 30.7% in the 3rd grade, and 31.0% in the 4th grade. It was observed that 73.3% of the students preferred the profession in the first 5 preference, and 47.0% of them intentionally selected the profession. It was found that 60.0% of the students were sometimes stressed, and 55.0% experienced clinical stress. Besides, 72.0% of male student nurses felt shyness and diffidence during care while providing care for female patients in clinics, 44.7% felt not confident while providing care for male patients, 67.0% were uncomfortable with the patients' relatives always wanting to be close to their patients, 76.7% stated that they had problems in leaving the workload to male nurses in tasks requiring physical strength while working with colleagues, and 37.7% had problems with physicians reflecting their stress on them while working with physicians. It was also found that the demographics of the students such as grade, place of residence, collecting information about the profession, intentional preference of the profession, self-definition, family attitude, clinical stress, stress, and coping methods affected the difficulties they experienced in the clinic (p<0.05). Consequently, it was determined that male student nurses mostly had problems with patients and their relatives, while they had fewer problems with physicians and colleagues. It is recommended that the research be conducted in a larger population in different regions.