The Situation of Nursing Education in Turkey During the Coronavirus 19 Pandemic

INTRODUCTION: In this research, it is aimed to determine how applied education in nursing is carried out in Turkey, the education-teaching methods used, the difficulties experienced, and solution suggestions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
METHODS: The sample of the descriptive study consisted of nursing education administrators of 80 universities in Turkey that provide undergraduate education in nursing. The data were collected online between February 2021 and March 2021, in the Qualtrics program, through a questionnaire containing 43 questions about the introductory features of the institution and educational management during the epidemic process. In the evaluation of the data, descriptive statistics such as number, percentage, and mean were used.
RESULTS: In 56.6% of the institutions, the number of students was over 500, the average number of students per instructor was 36.13 ± 17.71, and there were no instructors at the rate of 13-18.8% in the courses who have intensive credit and clinical practice; 52.5% of the administrators found the skill laboratory equipment in their schools partially sufficient; 52.5% of them had problems with education before the pandemic. During the pandemic, almost all of the schools held meetings (96.1%) on how to conduct education, and the university’s top management (82.5%) and higher education institution (73.7%) were most influential in the decisions taken. It was determined that while all of the theoretical courses were conducted remotely and hybrid, only 8.8% of the laboratories and 12.5% of the clinical/field practices were conducted face-to-face. Almost all the administrators (96.5%) stated that they could not reach the learning outcomes due to the inability to perform clinical/field practices. Administrators have easy access to the document of the course of distance education (72.5%); they stated that distance education has positive contributions to save time and flexibility of the course time (48.8%).
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: The problems experienced in nursing education programs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the inability to carry out laboratory and clinical/field applications, made it difficult to reach the educational goals. For this reason, it was concluded that practical education should be made face-to-face and the missing practices should be compensated.