Examining the Relationship Between Basic Nursing Skills, Hand Function, and Anxiety Levels in First‐Year Nursing Students: A Correlational Study

TL;DR

This study explores how hand function and anxiety levels relate to basic nursing skills in first-year nursing students.

Contribution

The study identifies specific correlations between hand function and certain nursing skills in novice students.

Findings

Low-to-moderate correlations were found between hand function and specific nursing skills like drug administration and blood collection.

No significant relationship was found between hand function and anxiety levels in the students.

Most students had right-hand dominance and had not performed nursing skills before.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between basic nursing skills, hand functions and anxiety levels of nursing students.

It is vital that basic nursing skills are achieved in the fastest and most accurate way in nursing.

This study was conducted with cross‐sectional correlational design.

The sample of study consisted of freshman nursing students (N = 123). The data were obtained by ‘Student Information Form’, ‘State‐Trait Anxiety Inventory’, ‘Basic Nursing Skills Forms’ and ‘Hand Skill Test’. Descriptive statistics and Pearson's correlation coefficient were used to analyse the data.

The mean age of the students was 19.24 ± 1.31 years and 69.9% were female. 76% (n = 95) of them had not experienced any nursing skill before. The students' scores of basic nursing skills were above average. State and Trait Anxiety Inventory total scores were 44.71 ± 6.57 and 39.78 ± 9.82, respectively. 93.6% (n = 117) of the students had right dominant hand. Significant low‐to‐moderate correlations were found between left hand fine motor skill score and nasogastric drug administration skill (r = 0.197), both hand fine motor skill scores and blood collection skill (r = 0.191), assembly fine motor skill score and sterile glove wearing (r = 0.200), and subcutaneous injection skill (r = 0.277). However, no significant correlation was found between hand function and anxiety levels.

In this study, a relationship was found between hand function and some basic skills. It is recommended that hand skills of nursing students should be evaluated multidimensionally with different measurement tools and similar studies should be planned in groups at different levels of nursing education and in larger samples.