Experiences of student nurses regarding the bursary system in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: During 2010, the South African nursing education system was restructured, changing student nurses from having supernumerary status to being bursary holders. Changes with the introduction of this new bursary system included institutional factors and benefits that could be removed from the students, potentially hampering students' sense of belonging. AIM: This study aimed to describe the experiences of students receiving bursaries in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province and to make recommendations for improving the system to bursary providers, educational institutions and practical settings based on these students' experiences of the bursary system. SETTING: The experiences of student nurses regarding the bursary system are described within a specified setting comprising two nursing campuses in KZN. METHOD: A qualitative study design was used and seven focus group interviews were conducted with purposively selected participants, representing the target population of first-, second- and third-year male and female nursing students registered for the Diploma in Nursing (General, Psychiatric, Community) and Midwifery. RESULTS: Two main themes and eight subthemes were identified. The findings indicated that some of the bursary system's experiences were negative as opposed to students having supernumerary status. These experiences had negative socio-economic, psychological, clinical, academic and family impacts. Many concerns related to staff members' attitudes, shortages of nurses and service demands during students' clinical practice assignments. CONCLUSIONS: The bursary system was not viewed as being beneficial to students as they did not receive all the benefits from being bursary holders. Support in clinical and academic areas was lacking as they were considered to be employees during their clinical assignments. There is an urgent need to review the bursary system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".