Preparation of dental and nursing professionals within Swedish higher education: navigating to confidence in literacies and professional knowledge.

Background: The professional education of dentists and nurses includes literacy, academic and professional literacy, and professional knowledge. These have a reciprocal relationship and contribute to the development of students and professionals. However, this is an area in need of further exploration. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate dentists' and nurses' experiences of academic and professional literacy and professional knowledge at the time of their graduation, and five years into their profession.
Methods: The material consisted of an evaluation distributed twice to dentists and nurses. The first time was immediately after graduation (degree evaluation), and the second time was five years after graduation (alum evaluation). Approximately 30% of the dentists and the nurses responded both times. We analyzed the data using non-parametrical methods.
Results: Upon graduation, the dentists scored high in academic and professional literacy and knowledge. Five years into the profession, dentists reported experiencing challenges with communication in English and tasks related to equitable treatment and equal rights. Nurses followed a similar pattern as the dentists. Still, by graduation, the newly graduated nurses expressed concerns about communication in English, and promoting sustainable development within their profession. The challenges persisted five years into their profession, particularly in areas such as communication in English and sustainable development, as well as work related to equitable treatment and equal rights.
Conclusions: The level of confidence and perception of a sufficient degree of knowledge regarding academic literacy, professional literacy, and professional knowledge is higher at the time of graduation in both professions compared to five years into the profession, where there is a decrease in areas concerning work related to equitability, and equality, and for dentists also in communication in English. Furthermore, nurses had a constant low confidence rating in both evaluations concerning sustainable development and communication in English. This indicates that targeted and continuous professional development is crucial to address these challenges and to bridge the gap between the knowledge and confidence levels at graduation and the evolving demands of professional practice over time. Thus, when reconstructing the overall curriculum in professional educations it is of great importance to provide tools to enhance future professional development rather than the perception of that they can rely solely on their education at graduation time.
Competing Interests: Declarations. Ethics approval and consent to participate: The project was approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Dnr: 2022-04816-01). These two evaluations are the regular ones administered to all students at Karolinska Institutet every year at graduation and every fourth year to the professionals five year in their profession. They are not mandatory to complete, there is no personal data in the evaluations, and they are completely anonymous. By responding to these evaluations, the students and health professionals give their informed consent to allow the responses to be used for research purposes and for means of quality assessments and improvements of the educations. This means that there was no risk of harming any participant or revealing any information concerning any specific participant. To clarify, data comprised only the answers to the questions in the evaluation. Thus, the risk was very low in relation to what could be gained, which was providing knowledge and feedback to curriculum work concerning academic and professional literacy in professional higher education in dentistry and nursing. Consent for publication: All authors read and approved the final version manuscript. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.
(© 2024. The Author(s).)