**1. Introduction**

The emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and its rapid spread worldwide prompted the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic state on 11 March 2020. Changes were required in world dynamics and society in general to combat the spread of the new coronavirus [1].

There was a need to reinvent strategies and readapt the teaching, learning, and assessment processes in nursing education [2,3], through digital training programs or tools such as simulation and telehealth [4,5].

The nursing discipline focuses on human responses to health-disease phenomena and life processes, with face-to-face nursing care being essential [6]. Thus, the training of health professionals to take care of people requires developing skills resulting from the action and articulation of various actors, encouraging debate, exchanging experiences, interaction, reflection, and critical thinking [6].

The impact of the new coronavirus has created unusual learning methods for nursing students. The clinical placement can be experienced as a challenging part of training, even discounting from the pandemic situation. Students already struggle to be part of a care team, where professional self is not yet defined, leading to feelings of insecurity about their competence [7].

**Citation:** Lobão, C.; Coelho, A.; Gonçalves, R.; Parola, V.; Neves, H.; Sousa, J.P. Changes in Clinical Training for Nursing Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Scoping Review Protocol. *Nurs. Rep.* **2022**, *12*, 210–216. https://doi.org/10.3390/ nursrep12010021

Academic Editors: Richard Gray and Sonia Udod

Received: 7 February 2022 Accepted: 9 March 2022 Published: 14 March 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

The pandemic has raised several challenges in teaching nursing students, namely in the clinical context. Uncertainty about the reception of students in healthcare teams or even the interruption of clinical training enhanced the need for a solution to promote clinical training by means of a simulation interface [7,8].

Additionally, students could not develop their practical activities in the clinical context at pre-licensing and advanced practice levels. This phenomenon required ingenious solutions to promote students' training, allowing them to complete their training programs at the usual schedule [8].

Training nursing students in a pandemic context is an urgent need. However, many clinical settings have interrupted or postponed the nursing students' clinical training due to lockdown policies, scarcity of material (specifically, individual protection equipment (IPE)), workload-related burnout, and the obligation to reduce the movement of people in clinical practice care settings [4,9]. Nevertheless, final year undergraduates have contributed to the fight against the pandemic in many contexts. This reality allowed for continuing the learning processes in clinical education by integrating the health teams created to respond to the pandemic [4,9]. However, while some students participating in this catastrophic scenario saw this as an extremely attractive challenge, which allowed knowledge consolidation in a historical era, the challenge has been seen as demanding and painful by others [9].

Despite recognizing the challenges that the pandemic has created, in clinical internships, nursing students revealed understanding and acceptance of the needed change. On the other hand, students mentioned that it was difficult to find an inbound clinical setting [7,8], which influenced their ability to adapt to this new reality, personally and academically. The need for an adjustment is reflected in students' achievements and expectations [3], based on their wellbeing [10–12], stress levels [13] and perception of their quality of life [14].

In all graduation levels, students will play a crucial role in future pandemics. When students are not adequately prepared in the art of care, simulation training improves anxiety and stress levels, especially in the simulation on managing critical patients and ventilatory support [15].

This scoping review is guided by the Joanna Briggs Institute's (J.B.I.) methodology to conduct scoping reviews, and aims to map the changes in clinical training for nursing students during the COVID-19 pandemic. An initial search of MEDLINE (PubMed), the J.B.I. Evidence Synthesis, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, PROSPERO, and Open Science Framework (O.S.F.) revealed that currently, there are no scoping reviews or systematic reviews (published or in progress) about this subject [16–18].

The main goal of this scoping review is to map the changes in clinical training for nursing students during the COVID-19 pandemic. It can significantly contribute to understanding this phenomenon to aid nursing educators in developing programs and proposals to target clinical teaching, learning, and assessment strategies for nursing students in similar contexts. This map will identify relevant topics to assist in advancing evidence-based nursing education, develop knowledge, and identify potential gaps.

This scoping review seeks to answer the following questions:

