Nursing Students' Evaluation of their Qualifications in Clinical Skills before Starting Training in Field

Background: learning clinical skills is one of the major parts of nursing education. the purpose of this study was nursing students’ evaluation of themselves of clinical skills before starting the training in field. method: this cross-sectional study was done on 107 nursing students of babol university of medical sciences which were getting trained in the 7th term. the students evaluated their skills using likert scale (no skills=1, full skilled=5). data analysis was done by spss 16, descriptive statistics, mann- whitney tests, pearson, and t-test. result: the nursing students reported their perfect skills in infection transmission prevention, checking vital signs, and drug therapy with the mean score of 4.81, 4.74, 4.63 respectively and their least skill was in body care, providing needs of waste, oxygen supply which mean score was 1.68, 3.50, and 3.55 respectively. there was not a meaningful relationship between gender and average score of self-evaluation of nursing student except oxygen therapy (p=0.008) and body care ( p=0.01 ). conclusion: the results of this study represents the strong and weak points of clinical skills of nursing students .they are more skillful in the prevention of infection transmission, checking vital signs and drug therapy than other clinical skills and are less skilled in body care, providing needs of waste, and oxygen supply. keywords: evaluation, clinical skills, nursing, student