Entrepreneurship Aptitude of Graduating Students of a City Run College of Nursing in Manila, Philippines

Abstract

In the olden times, women, be they mothers or grandmother or sisters of religious order or just another wise women, took on the role of nurses. In the mid-19th century however, Florence nightingale who started the first secular school of nursing, the first entrepreneurial venture of a nurse Of the same era, during the Crimean War, Mary Grant Seacole opened a hotel where wounded soldiers from both sides could recover. She charged the officers for their stays, but her services to soldiers were free. The dawn of the 20thcentury in the United States saw nurses contracting their services directly to patients. Until the Great Depression when people can no longer afford to pay the services of private nurses. Thereon, the scope of nursing practice seemed to have been limited to hospital or clinics and teaching or academe. But with the shifting health care landscape, new demands for nursing services, advancement in health care technology and the dictates of economy, there is an opportunity for nurses to offer their services directly to patients, the comeback of nurse entrepreneurship. Nursing entrepreneurship provides nurses with self-employment opportunities which allow them to pursue their personal vision and passion to improve health outcomes using innovative approaches. A nurse entrepreneur is considered to be a “proprietor of a business that offers nursing services of a direct care, educational, research, administrative or consultative nature”. It is said that that entrepreneurial ability is not necessarily innate, but may be enhanced by experience and education. This descriptive cross-sectional study was made to examine the aptitude of 50 graduating nursing students of a local(city-run) educational institution in Manila toward entrepreneurship with the use of an expert validated self-made entrepreneurship aptitude tool. The respondents are mostly female from the National Capital Region, between 19 to 21 years of age, and whose parents are mostly college graduates. The results revealed that the respondents had average aptitude for entrepreneurship. As nurse entrepreneurship is a new opportunity for nurses, it will be beneficial for students to be prepared to engage in this independent nursing endeavor. The academic sector should take advantage of the phenomenal paradigm shift of the youth of this generation from employment to entrepreneurship.