Humanistic practice ability has become a foundational competency in contemporary nursing curricula worldwide. It encompasses ethical and legal reasoning, interpersonal engagement, psychological adjustment, aesthetic sensitivity and practical caring behaviours. Yet educators have grown concerned that as healthcare becomes more technology-driven, technical proficiency may outpace the development of these human qualities, potentially eroding nurse–patient relationships and the delivery of holistic care. Therapeutic communication — purposeful interaction designed to build trust, understanding and collaboration among nurses, patients and other professionals — is widely regarded as the principal vehicle through which humanistic values are expressed at the bedside.

Previous research has typically examined communication skills and humanistic attributes in isolation from one another, leaving open the question of how tightly the two are intertwined. The new cross-sectional study, published in the journal Nursing Open, set out to fill that gap by measuring both constructs simultaneously and asking how much of the variation in students’ perceived humanistic practice ability could be explained by their communication competencies, over and above demographic and academic characteristics such as age, grade point average, English proficiency, caregiving responsibilities and whether nursing was their first-choice program.

The methodology was rigorous for a survey-based design. All eligible second-year students enrolled in the program’s Therapeutic Communication course were invited to participate, and 323 completed an online questionnaire. Therapeutic communication was assessed with the 28-item Global International Therapeutic Communication Scale, which spans six dimensions: setting the stage, building trust, active communication, communication skills, patient-centred communication and potential barriers. Humanistic practice ability was measured with the 29-item Humanistic Practice Ability of Nursing Scale, covering nursing communication, psychological adjustment, ethics and legal application, nursing aesthetics and caring practical ability. Both instruments showed excellent internal consistency in this sample, with Cronbach’s alpha values of 0.946 and 0.977 respectively, and a pilot study with 30 students confirmed the measures were clearly understood.

The descriptive results painted a confident picture of the cohort. Students reported a mean overall therapeutic communication score of 115.99 out of a possible 140, with communication skills and active communication scoring highest and perceived barriers rated only moderate. The mean humanistic practice ability score was 122.71 out of 145, with nursing aesthetic ability and ethics and legal application ability standing out as the strongest domains. The participants, whose ages ranged from 18 to 23 with a mean of 19.37 years, were academically strong — a mean grade point average of 3.80 on a five-point scale — and 71.2 percent said nursing had been their first choice of program. Notably, 57.9 percent carried responsibility for caring for dependents alongside their studies.

The correlational findings were striking. Every therapeutic communication dimension except potential barriers showed a moderate to strong positive association with humanistic practice ability, with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.53 for building trust to 0.65 for communication skills. Grade point average showed only a small positive correlation, and age, caregiving responsibilities and program choice showed no significant association at all. English proficiency, however, mattered considerably: students with advanced proficiency scored significantly higher on humanistic practice than those at the elementary level, with a mean difference of 14.48 points, and higher than intermediate-level peers by 7.65 points.

The most compelling evidence came from hierarchical multiple regression. Demographic and academic characteristics alone explained just 7.3 percent of the variance in perceived humanistic practice ability. When the six communication dimensions were added, the explained variance jumped to 48.7 percent — a change of 41.4 percentage points that was highly statistically significant. Within the final model, two dimensions emerged as the standout predictors: patient-centred communication, with a standardized coefficient of 0.253, and communication skills, at 0.233. English proficiency retained an independent, though smaller, association. The other communication dimensions, while correlated with the outcome on their own, did not add unique explanatory power once these two were accounted for — a pattern the authors attribute to the substantial overlap among communication competencies rather than to any lack of importance for trust-building or active listening.

The researchers are careful to frame these results as associations, not causal proof. Both constructs were measured by self-report within the same survey, raising the possibility of shared method variance: students confident in their interpersonal abilities may simply rate everything more positively, and perceptions of communication competence do not necessarily match objectively observed performance. The single-institution setting and narrow age range further limit generalizability, and voluntary participation may have introduced self-selection effects. Still, the magnitude of the association is difficult to dismiss, and it aligns with a growing international literature linking relational communication competence to compassionate, ethical and patient-centred care.

The English proficiency finding carries particular weight in the Saudi context, where English is the primary language of instruction in many nursing programs. Students more fluent in English may engage more easily with course materials, classroom discussion and communication-focused learning activities, and may feel greater confidence expressing themselves in interprofessional teams. The authors caution that language ability may also proxy broader educational advantages, but the independent survival of the effect in the regression model suggests that language support — clinical English modules, communication labs and scaffolded writing assistance — could help reduce inequities in how students develop and express humanistic competencies.

The practical implications reach well beyond Riyadh. The study’s authors argue that patient-centred communication and core communication skills should be woven longitudinally through nursing curricula rather than confined to a single course, using simulation with standardized patients, structured reflection, objective structured clinical examination stations and interprofessional education. At the policy level, the findings support embedding measurable communication and humanistic care indicators into national accreditation standards and competency frameworks, and aligning hospital orientation and continuing professional development with relational skills. For a region historically underrepresented in the international nursing literature, the study also offers context-specific evidence from the Middle East that may inform multi-institutional research worldwide. Whether better communicators become more humane nurses — or simply believe they have — is a question longitudinal and observational studies must now answer.

Subject of Research: The relationship between interprofessional therapeutic communication and humanistic practice ability among Saudi undergraduate nursing students

Article Title: Interprofessional Therapeutic Communication and Humanistic Practice Ability Among Saudi Nursing Students: A Cross‐Sectional Study

Article References: Andargeery, S. Y., & Alhowaish, O. A. (2026). Interprofessional Therapeutic Communication and Humanistic Practice Ability Among Saudi Nursing Students: A Cross‐Sectional Study. Nursing Open, 13(10), Article e70906. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.70906

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/nop2.70906

Keywords: nursing education, therapeutic communication, humanistic practice, patient-centred care, Saudi Arabia, cross-sectional study, English proficiency, nursing students, empathy, regression analysis, Vision 2030, clinical communication

The study was conducted between August and October 2025 using an electronic survey distributed through open online channels, which means an individual-level response rate could not be calculated, a limitation the authors acknowledge. Still, the breadth of institutional coverage gives the data unusual weight for a convenience-sampled survey. Students from both public and private universities took part, and the researchers found no meaningful gap between the two sectors in how many students had at least considered research: 80.0 percent of public university students versus 84.8 percent of private university students had thought about engaging in scientific research, a difference that was not statistically significant. Interest, in other words, is not the problem. The pipeline between interest and action is.

That pipeline was examined with considerable methodological care. Because existing validated questionnaires were not suitable for the Turkish undergraduate context, the study team built a study-specific instrument from scratch. It was developed by medical students who are themselves actively involved in research, informed by the published literature and by their direct experience of overcoming common research-related difficulties, and adapted to the realities of Turkish medical education. Item content was reviewed by a research-active professor to assess relevance and coverage, and face validity and feasibility were tested in a pilot with 20 medical students who evaluated clarity, comprehensibility, and completion time. Incomplete or inconsistent responses were excluded before analysis.

The statistical approach combined descriptive statistics with Mann–Whitney U tests for continuous variables and Chi-square or Fisher’s exact tests for categorical variables. To isolate the factors that genuinely predict research intention, the team used multivariable binary logistic regression, a technique that estimates the independent effect of each variable while holding the others constant. Statistical significance was set at p < 0.05. The results of that modeling are the heart of the study. Higher English proficiency was associated with roughly three times the odds of intending to participate in scientific research, with an adjusted odds ratio of 3.07 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.96 to 4.83. The presence of a research-active person in the student’s environment nearly doubled the odds, at an adjusted odds ratio of 1.92 (95 percent CI 1.30 to 2.82). Prior research experience raised the odds by a factor of 1.83 (95 percent CI 1.24 to 2.69), and prior academic-writing training by a factor of 1.86 (95 percent CI 1.10 to 3.16).

Each of these four factors tells a different story about what is missing. English proficiency is perhaps the least surprising but most consequential. The overwhelming majority of biomedical literature is published in English, and the dominant reference databases, journals, and international conferences operate in that language. A student who cannot comfortably read an English-language paper, let alone write one, faces a structural barrier that no amount of enthusiasm can fully compensate. The finding that English proficiency roughly triples the odds of research intention suggests that language instruction is not merely a general educational nicety but a direct gateway into the scientific enterprise itself.

The environmental factor is the most sociologically interesting. Simply knowing or being near someone who is actively doing research nearly doubles a student’s odds of intending to do research themselves. This is consistent with long-standing observations in the sociology of science that research careers are often seeded by proximity: a classmate who publishes, a teaching assistant who runs a study, a physician who mentions a case report over coffee. Such contacts demystify the process, provide informal mentorship, and signal that research is something people like the student actually do. In a large, geographically dispersed medical education system like Türkiye’s, the uneven distribution of such role models may help explain why research engagement remains limited overall despite broad interest.

The publication data in the study quantify how narrow that pipeline really is. Among all 1,062 respondents, only 10.8 percent reported at least one peer-reviewed publication. Among the subset who had actually participated in research, 23.7 percent had published. That means roughly three out of four students who managed to get involved in a research project still never saw the work reach print. The authors treat prior research engagement and publication history as separate indicators of previous research exposure and research output, and the gap between the two is itself a finding. Getting students into research teams is only half the battle; converting participation into a finished, peer-reviewed product requires skills, time, and supervision that many students evidently never receive.

The secondary objectives of the study add another layer. The researchers also examined factors associated with knowledge of reference-management software, the tools such as citation managers that are basic infrastructure for anyone writing a manuscript. In an era when artificial intelligence is reshaping how literature is searched and summarized, the ability to organize and cite sources systematically remains a foundational skill, and the fact that the authors singled it out for analysis signals how unevenly distributed even basic research tooling is among undergraduates. The study-specific questionnaire was designed to capture these research-related knowledge and perception gaps that existing instruments, built for other contexts, had left underexplored.

The authors are careful about what their design can and cannot show. Because the survey is cross-sectional, capturing a single moment in time, the findings should be interpreted as associations rather than causal relationships. A student with high English proficiency may intend to do research, or students who decide to pursue research may then invest in their English; the data cannot distinguish these directions. Convenience sampling through open online channels likewise means the sample may overrepresent students who are already more connected and more research-curious. The authors received no financial support for the study, obtained ethical approval from the İstinye University Ethics Committee under approval number 2025-330, conducted the work in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and collected all data anonymously with electronic informed consent from every participant.

Even with those caveats, the practical implications are hard to ignore. If intention to do research is driven by English skills, writing training, hands-on experience, and contact with research-active people, then medical schools have four concrete levers to pull. Embedding academic-writing instruction into the undergraduate curriculum, creating structured early research experiences, expanding English for medical purposes courses, and deliberately connecting students with mentors and peers who are actively publishing could each move the needle. The study’s own authorship illustrates the point: the questionnaire was built by students who had themselves navigated these barriers, and the paper’s author list spans institutions across Türkiye and beyond. The message from the data is that research careers rarely ignite in isolation. They catch fire where language, mentorship, training, and opportunity happen to collide, and the task for educators is to make that collision far less accidental.

Subject of Research: Barriers to research engagement among medical students in Türkiye

Article Title: Barriers to research engagement among medical students in Türkiye: the role of environmental factors

Article References: Barriers to research engagement among medical students in Türkiye: the role of environmental factors. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10514-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10514-1

Keywords: medical students, research engagement, medical education, Türkiye, mentorship, English proficiency, academic writing, cross-sectional study, environmental factors, publication output, survey research, logistic regression