الفهرس 
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Abstract
The transition from nursing student to nurse intern is challenging. One of the ways to facilitate this transition is to determine how students were prepared to start work (Guner, 2014). Preparedness of interns to provide safe, competent patient care is a significant concern because of increasing work demands and complexities in healthcare systems (Hatzenbuhler & Klein, 2019). The effect of inadequate preparedness during transition can be viewed from the personal and from the system level. On the personal level, interns during transition will experience higher levels of stress and emotional disturbance. On the system level, nurse interns’ inadequate preparedness poses negative impacts on healthcare quality (Yu et al., 2020).
Through preparedness for practice, there are mutual responsibilities among nursing faculties, healthcare settings and nursing students themselves. Nursing faculties provide academic preparation regarding theoretical knowledge, technical skills, critical thinking and soft skills while, healthcare settings provide a productive work environment, orientation program and preceptorship model. Therefore, there is need for closer partnership between nursing faculties and healthcare settings to plan better preparedness.
This study aims at assessing nurse interns’ preparedness for clinical practice during internship year. Research question: What is the level of nurse interns’ preparedness for clinical practice during internship year?
A descriptive research design was used. The study was conducted at El-Fayoum university hospitals where nurse interns have their internship training. The study subjects included all nurse interns (212) enrolled in the internship year (2020-2021) at El-Fayoum university hospitals. The study was carried out using convenient sample technique.
Data for this study were collected by using a self-administered questionnaire sheet, namely Nursing Practice Readiness Tool. It constructed by the researcher based on the review of the current related literature (Virkstis et al., 2009) to assess the nurse interns’ preparedness to practice. This questionnaire consisted of two parts, first part included data pertaining to the demographic characteristics of the respondents meanwhile, second part included 95 items; they were categorized into nine main dimensions.
The results of the study revealed that:
Majority of the studied nurse interns perceived a high level of preparedness for all dimensions except dimensions of professional satisfaction and stress.
The highest percentage of interns perceived a high level of preparedness for dimension of communication (83%) followed by dimension of professionalism (77.8 %) meanwhile; the lowest percentage of interns perceived a high level of preparedness for dimensions of stress (42.5%) and professional satisfaction (42.5%).
Two-thirds of the studied nurse interns perceived a high level of total preparedness for clinical practice.
There was a statistically significant relation between level of interns’ total preparedness for practice and their pre-university education (p=0.01) at p- value < 0.05.
There were statistically significant positive correlations among all preparedness dimensions scores at p<0.05.
Strong correlations were between preparedness score for critical thinking and scores of preparedness for both technical skills (r=0.788) and managing responsibilities (r=0.711) meanwhile, the weakest correlations were between preparedness score for managing stress and other dimensions scores.
Grades of 4th year and level of satisfaction with faculty follow-up were positive independent predictors for nurse interns’ total preparedness score where their p-value (0.011&0.002 respectively) <0.05 meanwhile, level of income was a negative independent predictor where its p-value (0.040) <0.05.
The value of R-square indicates that the previous independent predictors explained 8% of variations of nurse interns’ total preparedness score.