Nursing students' opinion on clinical learning in medium and long-term care for older persons: systematic review of qualitative studies

Introduction: Previous studies on nursing students’ opinions about clinical learning in gerontogeriatric settings are scarce, although the crucial importance of this care in ensuring people's dignity and quality of life is recognised and residential facilities for older people offer valuable learning opportunities, this area of nursing care has been reported as unattractive.

Goals and Methods: The aim is to synthesise scientific evidence on nursing students' opinions about the contexts of clinical teaching in medium and long-term care for older person. We performed a systematic review of qualitative studies, with meta-aggregation of results, according to Joanna Brigs Institute methodology (Porrit et al., 2024). We included published articles involving undergraduate nursing student’s opinion about their experiences of clinical learning environment, during the internship in medium and long-term care units, providing care to elderly persons. All qualitative studies were included, and mixed methods, whose qualitative data could be extracted and synthesised, published in Portuguese, English, French, Spanish or Italian, published up to 31 July 2025. Search strategy was performed in 13 databases: MEDLINE Complete, CINAHL Complete, Nursing & Allied Health Collection: Comprehensive, MedicLatina, Library, Information Science; Technology Abstracts, Cochrane, Web of Science, LILACS, Biblioteca Virtual da Saúde, ProQuest, RCAAP e Google Scholar.

Results: Thirty-four qualitative and mixed-method studies with good methodological quality were included. Three main themes were identified from the nursing students' quotes:  Clinical learning experience in the context of medium and long-term care for older person, Clinical supervision of students in the context of medium and long-term care for older persons and Aspects of the clinical learning environment.

Conclusions: The importance of close clinical supervision was identified, based on normative, formative and support functions and dimensions of the clinical teaching environment that promote positive student opinion.