English in Clinical Settings: A Target Situation Analysis of Nurse-Patient and Interprofessional Communication Needs Among Undergraduate Nursing Students in Pakistan

Abstract

The present study was conducted Target Situation Analysis (TSA) of 99 female students of nursing undergraduate programme at School of Nursing, The University of Faisalabad (TUF), Pakistan. The study highlighted two key areas of clinical English use for nurses and patients, interprofessional communication and nurse–patient communication. Applied a quantitative survey method with a six-section Likert-scale questionnaire to compare the two domains in terms of their requirements for clinical English. The use of paired-samples t-test, one-way ANOVA and Pearson correlation analysis. According to the results, there was a statistically significant difference between the interprofessional communication use (B2; M = 3.646) and nurse–patient communication use (B3; M = 2.889) and this difference was confirmed by a paired t-test (t = 7.242, p < .001). The response distribution of the item B3 was very spread out (SD = 1.203) and there were 42.4% of students who disagreed or strongly disagreed with the item in the entire instrument, thus recording the lowest mean. Interprofessional communication (B2) was rated significantly higher on both measures and there was no significant difference between them (t = 0.547, p = .586). The results presented a higher correlation between the use of interprofessional communication and ESP needs (r = .285), course evaluation (r = .502) and speaking self-competence (r = .544) than between speaker competence and nurse–patient communication use. There were no statistically significant differences among academic levels for either domain in the ANOVA results, indicating that the two-tier gap does not differ significantly across clinical experience. Communication with the nurse (39.4%) and interprofessional communication (37.4%) were the second and third highest of the priorities selected in the Section G priority checklist, next to pronunciation fluency (43.4%). The overall instrument had excellent reliability (ɑ = .900). The results show that there is a two-tiered system of clinical English use in TUF, which suggests an urgent clinical English intervention needed in TUF based on CLT.

Keywords: target situation analysis, nurse–patient communication, interprofessional communication, ESP, nursing education, CLT, Pakistan, clinical English, needs analysis