Background and purpose: The objective of medical education is to train competent and qualified workforce in order to provide services in various health environments. One of the important objectives of Operating Room students is to train workforce who can involve in patient’s health and recovery. Training these students should cause clinical ability and independent decision making during surgery. Since students during internship face with many problems, this study has been conducted to explore and describe the challenges and experiences.Methods: This qualitative study is a phenomenology that was conducted based on 20 students in the last semester of Operating Room associate’s degree with purposive sampling. Deep and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data and data were analyzed by content analysis method.Results: The findings in 5 main themes: (1) Physical space and equipment in the operating room, (2) The student’s position in operating room, (3) Integrating knowledge and action, (4) Managing education environment and 5- Student’s viewpoint about operating room and working in it.Conclusions: Interviews with students revealed the educational environment challenges with which they are faced during their study. Teachers can provide solutions to overcome the challenges and create a positive atmosphere for students’ learning using results of this study and students may continue their interest in education and improve the quality of their education.

Introduction: As a type of clinical education, ambulatory medicine has challenges, which underlines the evaluation of the system. This study endeavored to design a system to evaluate ambulatory medical education in the Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. Methods: This developmental study was conducted in two phases in the years 2019-2022. In two phases, evaluating of the status quo and designing a system for evaluating ambulatory settings was done. This way, an agenda was developed. Results: Designing an agenda for evaluating ambulatory medical education are the important results of this study. This system includes stakeholders, policymakers, and administrators. The users are the clinical professors in educational clinics, developers of the clinical education system in education development center. The end stakeholders are students of medicine, patients, and society. The system consists of several subsystems wherein several processes are running. Conclusion: According to the developed system, it is possible to formatively evaluate ambulatory setting and in addition to extracting results to identify the strong and weak points of clinical education, the strengths and weaknesses of the system can also be evaluated and improved.

Introduction: Clinical teaching is a major part of medical education without which it is impossible to train competent physicians .With regard to the complexity of clinical teaching, current changes in medical environment and diverse roles of clinical teachers, the necessity of doing a comprehensive study on such phenomenon, was felt. This study aimed to explore effective background factors of clinical education based on clinical teachers’ experiences.Methods: This is a qualitative study with conventional content analysis. Data were collected through purposive sampling and semi-structured interviews conducted with clinical teachers, informal interviews conducted with the students, and field observations.Results: Based on the obtained results of coding steps, educational structure, professional duties and motivational elements were background factors affecting clinical teaching. Education time constraints, diverse and overloaded duties of clinical teachers, lack of financial support, lack of an appropriate position for teaching, priority of research over education and the challenges in teachers’ role are the most important factors affecting clinical teaching.Conclusions: Making a change in educational structure to have a culture that values clinical teaching and respects that as a service can solve a lot of clinical teaching and clinical teachers’ problems. The findings of the present study can help the authorities in medical universities and faculty members to take strategies to promote the quality of clinical teaching.

Introduction: The educational environment has an important effect on students' learning and their learning activities. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the students' views on clinical education environment in Aja university of medical sciences. Methods: In this cross-sectional descriptive analytic study, the climate governing the educational environment was measured using the Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure (DREEM) standard questionnaire. The research population was all the students of the clinical training course of Aja University of Medical Sciences in 2022. Sampling was done by proportional stratified method and randomly in each stratum. Data analysis was done through descriptive and inferential statistical tests using SPSS. Results: The results showed that the average of the total educational climate is 3. 19±, 0. 50, which indicates a relatively favorable situation. The highest average score of students' perception was 3. 42±, 0. 65 related to the area of students' perception of their academic ability and the lowest average score was related to students' perception of learning with an average of 2. 97±, 0. 60. There was no significant relationship between the gender variable and students' perception of the educational atmosphere (P<0. 05). In addition, the results showed that there is a significant relationship between the GPA variable of students and their perceptions of the overall environment of clinical education (P=0. 002). There was significant relationship between the variable of school and students' perception of clinical education environment (P= 0. 010). Conclusion: The atmosphere of clinical education from the perspective of the students in this study was relatively favorable. Improvement is needed to have a better quality educational environment, and future qualitative studies are recommended to confirm and deeply understand this finding.

Introduction: Clinical education is a dynamic process and a core in nursing professional education. The clinical education curriculum has been planned to develop nursing education, yet students are confronting challenges in clinical education. The purpose of this study was to compare clinical education from the perspective of nursing students.Methods: In this descriptive cross sectional study, using the census method, 150 nursing students were selected from nursing and midwifery faculties. Data were collected with a 35-item researcher made questionnaire, in Likert scale, with five domains in clinical education. Descriptive and analytic statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS (version 16).Results: The students showed better scores in objectives and educational planning (19.92±5.90) and moderate in instruction domain (14.73±4.96). The confrontation with student (51.2±33.7), clinical environment (79.2±48.9), and supervision/ evaluation was assigned weak scores. Also, most scores were related to nursing faculty at Shahed University and the least was to Shahid beheshti nursing faculty. There were no statistical differences in perspective of clinical education in different domains according to gender. Male and female students had different perspectives on clinical education.Conclusions: Given the essential role of clinical education, it is recommended to improve the skills of nursing students. Therefore, more attention is needed in school administrators and preparation.

Background & Aims : Clinical learning environment has an important role in clinical learning of nursing students. Differences between expected and actual clinical learning environment of nursing student reduces their interest in clinical environment and clinical performance. Therefore, the aim of present study was to compare the perception of nursing students of expected and actual clinical learning environment in medical-surgical wards.Materials & Methods : This descriptive-longitudinal study was conducted 75 baccalaureate nursing students from Urmia nursing & midwifery faculty. In the beginning of the semester, the expected perception of their clinical environment was determined and in the end of semester the actual perception of students of their clinical environment was determined again. For data analysis, clinical learning environment inventory was used that contain 49 item in six areas. Data analysis was conducted by SPSS software using descriptive and inferential statistics.Results: The findings showed that the average score of nursing students’ perception of expected clinical learning environment was 154.89 ± 14.05 and the average score of nursing students’ perception of actual clinical learning environment was 108.41 ± 12.78. The dependent sample t-test showed that there were statistical differences between actual and expected perception on nursing students regarding clinical learning environment.Conclusion: The gap between nursing students’ perception of expected and actual clinical learning environment may have negative effects on their clinical learning. This indicates that nursing education managers should further attend to clinical learning environment of nursing students.

Introduction: This study aimed to explore the challenges of professional identity formation at clinical education environments from the faculty members’ viewpoints. Methods: This is a qualitative study. The population consisted of clinical faculty members of Tehran University of Medical Sciences. In this study, 39 faculty members participated in an in-depth semi-structured interview. To analyze the data, conventional content analysis approach was used. Open coding was extracted from the participants’ statements that represented their experiences. Then, based on their similarities, the codes were classified. Subcategories were emerged and after arranging, they were classified into categories based on their relationships. Results: Instability of professional commitment, patientcenteredness as the missing loop care and treatment, and inappropriate conductive context were explored as the challenges of professional identity in clinical educational environment. Conclusion: According to the results of the study, the formation of professional identity among the providers is not an easy task because many factors affect the formation of professional identity. Therefore, a comprehensive shift towards forming the professional identity at individual and organizational level should be planned.