Qualitative Research Proposal: Challenges faced by graduate students in the field of nursing: A case study of first year nurses in King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Saudi Arabia.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH PROPOSAL
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Challenges faced by graduate students in the field of nursing: A case study of first year nurses in King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has been known to depend on nurses that are not from its country. In any case, recruitment of these non-Saudi nurses has had its challenges majorly the result of the 1991 Gulf war and also the political instability of the Middle East since that war. Saudi Arabia healthcare services demands expand exponentially and though there are graduates annually, the supply of these graduates is insufficient to meet their rising demands of healthcare services in Saudi Arabia, as Almaki, FitzGerald and Clark found out "the challenge chronic shortage of nurses in Saudi Arabia has been made intense by high rates of turnover." (306). Their study further reinforced the fact that the expatriate form a larger proportion of nursing professional in Saudi Arabia, thus: "the Saudis comprise of a paltry only 29.1% of the nursing population which gets even lower in the private health facilities where they make up only 4.1 percent of the total." (306).
Considering the world-wide percentage of nurses, Saudi Arabia has less than 30% of the nurses. Several sources in Saudi Arabia have linked this low percentage to factors influencing social and cultural parameters in the sense that there are more negative prevailing images and perception than positive ones that portray nursing to having low status. These factors include mixing of gender in the profession, long hours of working as well as shift rotating happen to render nursing a socially unacceptable choice of occupation.
This has therefore motivated me to develop interest on a personal level to explore how these prevalent images about nursing, and status perception has impacted the Saudi Arabia nurses, and also the perception the specified nurses have on their choices on nursing as an occupation.  According to the World Health Organization (2006), there is a shortage of nurses in Saudi Arabia, a phenomenon caused by low enrolments in course that offer nursing options. Currently, Saudi Arabia relies on immigrant nurses who make up to 60% of the total number of staff.
The background of this research study will be the focus in student graduates in their first year of working as nurses in Saudi Arabia.
Conceptual Framework
There are a myriad of challenges that face many new graduate in the Saudi Arabian health sector, according to Ministry of Education, "the health services organizations of Saudi Arabia are labor intensive, nurses making a large part of this labor, which becomes a major challenge to many fresh graduates who are struggling to acclimatize themselves with the system while at the same time much is being expected of them." (1424). Further, with over 80 percent of the Saudi Arabian nursing workforce being noncitizens, c...