Final-year nursing students' perceptions of humanistic education in nursing: a cross-sectional descriptive study

Background Humanistic education is an important part of nursing education. Final-year nursing students' perceptions of nursing humanistic education are under-investigated. This study aimed to examined final-year nursing students' perceptions of nursing humanistic education in both school and hospital.Methods This was a cross-sectional descriptive study conducted from May to June 2022 among 107 final-year nursing students with a self-designed questionnaire.Results Final-year nursing students recognized the importance of humanistic education, scoring above 4.0 on a 1-5 scale, while their initiative to enhance humanistic qualities was relatively low. Students' satisfaction with the number of humanities courses offered was only 3.7 +/- 0.862. Moreover, 62.6% of students believed there was a need to enhance humanistic environmental development including corridor culture. The "monotonous teaching format" (63.6%) and "teaching methods" (64.5%) have emerged as focal points that students identified as needing attention and improvement.Conclusions In the future, nursing humanistic education can be enhanced by increasing the proportion of humanities, improving teaching methods, stimulating students' learning motivation, and strengthening the construction of humanistic environment.