Effect of Acupressure Therapy Applied to Nursing Students on Exam Anxiety and Vital Signs

To examine the effect of acupressure therapy method applied to nursing students on exam anxiety and vital signs.

In nursing education, the Fundamentals of Nursing course, which includes the basic concepts, theories, principles and methods of nursing care and provides cognitive, affective and psychomotor skills, is the course where students first come into contact with the nursing profession. The aim of this course is to turn students into professional nurses in connection with theoretical knowledge, laboratory and clinical practice. In the Fundamentals of Nursing course, which forms the basis for other nursing profession courses; Following the explanation of the theoretical content in the classroom environment, the applications are shown with the demonstration method, and then psychomotor skills are tried to be gained by students making applications on various models and/or models in skill laboratories. Different evaluation methods such as written, oral, practical-oral exams are used in the evaluation of courses. During this evaluation, nursing students experience different levels of anxiety and their exam performance is affected. There are many factors that affect the level of anxiety. Wafika and Halabi stated that anxiety in nursing students may be related to extra-individual, intra-individual or inter-individual forces; They stated that this may be caused by factors such as financial problems, long working hours, feeling of inadequacy, information overload, clinical pressure, lack of time to meet expectations for exams and personal needs. Anxiety is not always harmful; low and moderate levels of anxiety support the student's creativity and development, while high levels of anxiety can cause inattention and concentration problems. This may negatively affect student learning and lead to application errors and low academic performance in exams. In addition, exam anxiety causes emotional and behavioral changes, as well as physiological changes such as increased heart rate, difficulty breathing, muscle tension, and rapid breathing. At this point, it is important to manage anxiety and different alternative therapy methods can be used for this. These methods include alternative therapies such as music therapy, gradual muscle relaxation exercises, hypnosis, imagination, aromatherapy and acupressure. Acupressure (Shiatsu) is a massage technique based on traditional Chinese medicine, consisting of the words Shi = finger and atsu = pressure, and can be applied with fingers, hands, wrists, palms, knees or special stimulation bands. Acupressure aims to correct the disrupted energy flow by applying pressure to certain points on the meridians in the body, stimulating the body's self-healing abilities. Acupressure technique is noninvasive, safe and effective. Acupressure is not a substitute for other traditional treatments; Rather, it supplements and supports other improvement methods. When the literature is examined; In the study conducted by Eunkyung and Jin-Hwa Park on nursing students, ear acupressure application was found to be effective in reducing the level of exam anxiety. Kristina et al. In a study conducted by, the effect of acupressure application, which was used to reduce stress non-pharmacologically in university students, was examined. It has been observed that it significantly reduces the stress response, decreases subjective stress scores, and increases correct responses. In a study by İnangil in which he investigated the effects of EFT and music therapy on test anxiety with 90 students, he concluded that there was a statistically significant decrease in the pulse rate of the EFT group. When test anxiety is severe or permanent, students may not be able to adapt to the environment and the exam. As a result, he may not be able to use the information he has learned and knows in the exam. Therefore, it is important for students to recognize their anxiety and use different effective coping strategies to control them. At this point, managing students' test anxiety with effective methods is very important in terms of increasing academic success. For this reason, this research was planned to examine the effect of the acupressure therapy method applied to nursing students on exam anxiety and vital signs.