Narrative nursing was proposed and entered the nursing field from the development of narrative medicine (Charon, 2001) . Narrative nursing refers to a nursing practice in which nurses deconstruct problems in patients’ stories and reconstruct the meaning of stories by listening to and responding to patients’ stories and using narrative nursing abilities such as empathy and reflection to implement targeted nursing interventions for patients (Huang & Liu, 2016) . At present, narrative nursing is regarded as an effective method to enter into patient experience and has a recognized positive intervention and treatment role in nursing work (Fioretti et al., 2016) . Compared with the traditional teaching method, narrative nursing education can effectively mobilize the learning enthusiasm of nursing interns, and help to combine theory with practice, so as to improve the learning validity. In addition, narrative teaching method is helpful to cultivate students’ comprehensive abilities, such as humanistic care ability and communication ability, and is conducive to enhancing professional identity, which is a teaching concept in line with the development of contemporary nursing professional education (Guo et al., 2020) .

In recent years, policy documents such as the Outline of the Healthy China 2030 Plan (State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2020) and the Action Plan on Further Improving Nursing Services (2023-2025) issued by the State have emphasized the concept of humanistic care to varying degrees, requiring nurses to enhance their awareness of active service and humanistic care, and to care for, love and respect patients in the nursing process. Provide careful care, psychological support and humanistic care. Therefore, it is the demand of future nursing development to train nursing talents with high-level humanistic care ability. As a backup for clinical nurses, nursing students also need to receive humanistic education and develop humanistic caring skills. In China, humanistic courses are primarily provided in the form of lectures with very few opportunities for students to experience real-world scenarios outside the classroom (Liu et al., 2023) . Narrative nursing teaching can be used in clinical practice setting to create a visual and perceptible experience for nursing students to perceive and experience humanistic care. This study aims to explore the effectiveness of narrative nursing education on the quality of humanistic care for clinical nursing interns, in order to provide theoretical basis for further promoting narrative nursing education for nursing interns.

The results of this study showed that the total score of humanistic care quality, humanistic care perception ability and humanistic care ability dimension scores of nursing interns in experimental group were significantly higher than those in control group after narrative nursing education training (all P < 0.05), but there were no significant differences in humanistic care concept and humanistic care knowledge dimension between experimental group and control group after training (P > 0.05). The reasons may be as follows: In this study, the design of narrative nursing training courses pays more attention to the training of practical knowledge such as narrative nursing techniques and nursing communication skills, while the training of theoretical knowledge of humanistic care is less involved, resulting in the low level of humanistic care knowledge of nursing interns. In addition, humanistic care perception and humanistic care ability can be acquired through training and clinical practice, which is easier to improve. The concept of humanistic care is the embodiment of human values, which is related to nursing interns’ professional value orientation and the accumulation and precipitation required for a long time. It may also be related to the fact that the exploration and practice of humanistic care concept is still in the initial stage in China and the practice atmosphere of humanistic nursing in hospitals is not good (Shang et al., 2018) . In the future, it is necessary to continue to explore and improve the content of narrative nursing education for trainee nursing interns, promote the normalization of narrative nursing clinical practice, and cultivate more nursing talents with comprehensive humanistic literacy.

Humanistic care perception refers to the perceptual knowledge that nurses acquire after implementing nursing humanistic care actions, which is integrated with the feeling state and emotional experience of themselves and nursing objects, including the perception of caring objects and caring self-perception (Liu, 2011) . The results of this study showed that the scores of nursing interns in the experimental group were significantly higher than those in the control group through narrative nursing education and training, with statistical significance (P < 0.05), which was more consistent with the results of Wang Shanshan et al. (Wang et al., 2019) . First of all, the design and training of narrative nursing theory course make nursing interns have a general understanding and clear feeling of humanistic nursing practice. In addition, in the implementation of narrative nursing in clinical practice, nursing interns need to explore the context of patients’ problems with narrative questioning and communication, deconstruct and solve patients’ problems, have in-depth communication and close interaction with patients, and can deeply perceive patients’ responses and their sense of safety and trust, identification and hope, and warmth and harmony after receiving care. Through narrative nursing practice, nursing interns can also obtain a sense of professional achievement, self-worth satisfaction, moral pleasure and a sense of mission to the good after receiving patients’ response and positive recognition. Therefore, the implementation of narrative nursing education can improve nursing interns’ humanistic care perception ability, and the improvement of nursing interns’ humanistic care perception ability also lays a good foundation for the formation of their humanistic care ability.

Humanistic care ability refers to the relevant ability required by nurses to implement nursing humanistic care action, including caring experience ability and caring behavior ability (Liu, 2011) . In this study, the score of humanistic caring ability of nursing interns in experimental group was significantly higher than that in control group through narrative nursing education training, and the difference was statistically significant (P < 0.05). It can be seen that in the process of clinical practice teaching, the use of narrative nursing practice teaching model can effectively improve the humanistic care ability of nursing interns. First of all, through the training and application of the five technologies of narrative nursing, namely externalization, deconstruction, rewriting, external witness and treatment documents, nursing interns can be guided to pay attention to the behavioral responses of patients in clinical practice, listen to the voices of patients and their families, understand the pain and needs of patients, and integrate the social roles, cultural backgrounds and personality characteristics of patients. Analyze the connotation and influencing factors of nursing interns’ caring needs, so as to improve their caring experience ability; In addition, through responsibility, care and nursing communication and other content training, nursing interns’ emotional communication ability, spiritual support ability, interpersonal coordination ability and problem solving ability can be fully mobilized to implement humanistic care actions for patients, which can effectively improve nursing interns’ narrative nursing ability. In addition, the training and practice of parallel medical record writing can also enable nursing interns to better understand the disease situation of patients and improve their empathy ability (Chen & Yang, 2019) . Moreover, by reviewing and giving feedback to the parallel medical records written by nursing interns, practical teachers can also correct their inappropriate understanding and practice of narrative nursing, thus promoting the continuous improvement of their humanistic care ability.

With the continuous progress in the field of medical care, nursing work has placed more emphasis on humanistic care services. In recent years, narrative nursing as a humanistic nursing method has been applied in the clinical practice teaching of nursing interns, opening up a new way to carry out nursing humanistic teaching (Yu et al., 2022; Wang, 2020) . In this study, we can conclude that the implementation of narrative nursing education has a positive effect on improving the humanistic care quality of nursing interns. This study only conducted narrative nursing education research in one medical institution. In the future, the research setting can be expanded to include multiple hospitals across different regions to enhance the generalizability and explore cultural influences on narrative nursing education. In addition, the sample size of this study is small, and it can be continued to increase the sample size and possibly extend duration of the study in the future to examine the long-term impact of narrative nursing education on humanistic care quality. Future studies could also explore potential barriers to improving the understanding of caring knowledge and caring concept through narrative nursing education methods.

The work was supported by grants from Nursing Research Special fund of the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University (Grant No. 2022219).