The Development of a Clinical Portfolio as a Learning Approach for Intensive Care Nurses in a Private Nursing Education Institution in Gauteng

Clinical portfolios guide clinical learning experiences and assess
the student’s attainment of programme outcomes. The researcher
experienced that neither the student nor the educator utilised the
clinical portfolio effectively in the development and transformation
of the intensive care nursing student at the private nursing
education institution. The purpose of the study was to improve
the structure and enhance the use of clinical portfolios as a
learning approach in intensive care nursing education.The study
objectivesforthestudywas:
This study is a shortened intervention research with qualitative
methods for data collection from intensive care nursing students,
lecturers, clinical facilitators, and nursing education experts. A
content analysis(Tesch,1990)wasusedfordataanalysis.
The setting for this study was set in a private nursing education
institution in Gauteng that offers the intensive care programme.
Purposive sampling was used to select participants of the three
focus groups.
Students were not as concerned about the structure of the
clinical portfolio as they were concerned about how the portfolio
assists them in reaching their outcomes. Small changes
were recommended. Educators and the literature were more
concerned about the structure of the clinical portfolio and less
concernedabouttheprocessofapplication.
The clinical portfolio was redesigned to improve its function as a
learning approach and is ready for pilotinginlargersamplegroups.
Stage 1: to solicit the opinion of students and their educators on the
quality of the existing clinical portfolio and their recommendations
for the design and utilization of a revisedclinical portfolio;