Reconciling Assertive Communication Skills With Undergraduate
Nursing Education: Qualitative Perspectives From British and Saudi
Newly-Graduated Nurses
Q7
Q6
Mansour Mansour
a,
*, Aysar Jamama
b
, Maha Al-Madani
c
, Roslyn Mattukoyya
d
,
Abdelrahman Al-Anati
b
a
Fundamental of Nursing Department, College of Nursing, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, Saudi Arabia
b
Community Health Nursing Department, College of Nursing, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, Saudi Arabia
c
Fundamentals of Nursing Department, College of Nursing, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, Saudi Arabia
d
School of Nursing and Midwifery, Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education,Anglia Ruskin University, Chelmsford Campus, Essex, United
Kingdom
Q1
Received 23 August 2019; revised 20 December 2019; accepted 12 February 2020
Abstract
Background: Assertive communication skills are key to establishing effective teamwork. Nursing education has long been recognized
as important for providing the future workforce with high-calibre interpersonal skills, including assertive communication. There is little
evidence to examine how far assertive communication skills are learnt and practised during undergraduate nursing education. Newly-
graduated nurses are in a unique position to reflect on both their undergraduate nursing education and its contributions to their current
communication practice.
Objectives: To explore newly-graduated British and Saudi nurses’ views on the contributions of their undergraduate nursing
education towards learning and practising assertive communication skills.
Design: A total of 96 newly-graduated British and Saudi nurses completed a survey with qualitative, open-ended questions be-
tween 2015 and 2017. The nurses reflected on learning and practising assertive communication skills during their undergraduate
nursing education, and in their current clinical role. The nurses’ qualitative responses were analysed using thematic analysis.
Results: Three major themes were identified from data analysis: “Drivers for speaking up”, “The pedagogical context of speaking
up” and “Ways of building self-confidence”.
Conclusions: Undergraduate nursing education across both the UK and Saudi Arabia emphasizes the need to acquire the skills to
communicate assertively in clinical settings. However, the nursing education received by the participants fails to address key
operational skills which would help the nurses to translate such awareness into practice. Education and training must be matched
by the elimination of implicit sanctions against speaking up in both educational and work settings. Future research needs to
examine not only the operational skills that are necessary to challenge poor practice, but also the contributions of personality
* Corresponding author. Fundamentals of Nursing Department,
College of Nursing, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University. 2835
King Faisal Road, Dammam, 34212, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia.
E-mail address: mjmansour@iau.edu.sa (M. Mansour).
Peer review under responsibility of AMEEMR: the Association
for Medical Education in the Eastern Mediterranean Region.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hpe.2020.02.001
2452-3011/© 2020 King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences. Production and Hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access
article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect
Health Professions Education xxx (xxxx) xxx
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Please cite this article as: Mansour M et al., Reconciling Assertive Communication Skills With Undergraduate Nursing Education: Qualitative
Perspectives From British and Saudi Newly-Graduated Nurses, Health Professions Education, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hpe.2020.02.001