Student nurse attrition from pre-registration courses: investigating methodological issues

There has been increasing recent interest in student nurse attrition. Despite a long history of research into the problem, attrition rates remain a cause for concern. This paper presents a review of the research undertaken in the UK, together with an international comparison. The foci of previous studies have been diverse and have included investigation of students’ leaving reasons, their experience of stress, and course-related difficulties of students in progress. This review illustrates the complexity of issues surrounding student nurse discontinuation, highlighting a number of methodological limitations of prior research. These include the lack of a common definition of attrition, low response rates in surveys, and the imprecise definition of categories of leaving reasons. There is also a dearth of studies based on the perspectives of students. In the UK there is little documentation of whether measures have been adopted to reduce attrition and there is no evidence of evaluation. If future research is to be aimed at reducing attrition, these conceptual and methodological issues need to be addressed.