Summary

Clinical teaching in the context of Nursing and Midwifery requires the integration of knowledge, skills and attitudes as well as striking the balance between the knowledge that learners achieve in classroom learning and its application in the clinical settings. This enables Nurses and Midwives become competent and therefore able to use clinical judgment in the provision of care with an effect to improve, maintain or recover health. These are the type of Nurses and Midwives who are expected to add up to the human resources for health pool for providing health services in Tanzania.

To achieve this level of quality, training of Nurses and Midwives needs to be well versed with clinical instructors who would foster opportunity to link theoretical knowledge obtained in classrooms to actual situations of patient care in the clinical settings. Clinical instructors at this point are key people to enable clinical skills acquisition by nurses and midwives in the clinical settings.

Clinical teaching for Nursing and Midwifery in Tanzania has for many years been experiencing challenges which have impacted on the quality of Nursing and Midwifery services. Due to this fact, performance of Nurses and Midwives who are newly deployed to work at different places have not been performing to the optimum level, and therefore contributing to slow rate of achieving goals of the health policy, objectives of the Health Sector Strategic Plans and MDGs.

In response to this, the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children (MoHCDGEC) through the Division of Nursing and Midwifery Services decided to develop these National Guidelines with seven (7) operational guideline areas. The development of this document was based on the critical analysis of the real situations of clinical settings and learning of Nurses and Midwives. This has been through the involvement of Nurses and Midwives at all levels from MoHCDGEC, National and Regional hospitals, training institutions and experts from other departments and background....