Nursing students' and clinical educators' perceptions of characteristics of effective clinical educators in an Australian university school of nursing.

Background: This study is a replication of research undertaken by Mogan and Knox in 1987, which investigated and described characteristics of 'best' and 'worst' clinical educators. They developed and used an instrument known as the Nursing Clinical Teacher Effectiveness Inventory (NCTEI), a 48 item checklist that describes discrete characteristics clustered into five subscales or categories: teaching ability; interpersonal relationships, personality traits, nursing competence and evaluation. The tool has since been used in several countries including Greece, Hong Kong, Israel and North America and is the instrument most frequently used to identify effective clinical teaching characteristics of clinical educators.