Impact of role conflicts and self-efficacy on academic performance of graduate-entry healthcare students: A lagged study

Graduate entry healthcare students experience many challenges during their academic journey. The impact of these challenges needs to be considered to support students through their training and education. In this study, we examined the impact of experiencing these role conflicts (at the outset of the academic year), for example, family and caring responsibilities, activities with family/friends, and daily tasks/chores, on the academic performance (at the end of the academic year) of graduate-entry healthcare students. We also investigated the potential of students' self-efficacy for learning to mitigate the extent to which such role conflicts impact academic performance. Findings demonstrate that the more graduate entry healthcare students experienced conflicts between their life responsibilities and their academic responsibilities, the worse their academic performance was across the year. This negative relationship was somewhat mitigated by high self-efficacy for learning. The practical implications of our research suggest the need to provide specific mitigation strategies to support healthcare students regarding conflicts between their life/family responsibilities and their academic work.