A Survey of Nurses' Opinion on Continuous Nursing Education (Kermanshah 2003)

Introduction: Continuous Nursing Education (CNE) is considered as a means of proper reply to the rapid changes in health care delivery and promoting professional standards of current practice among the nurses. Professionals in CNE believed that CNE programs must be community based but this need assessment had not been done for nurses .This study was conducted to investigate the nurses' opinion about CNE, and to determine the educational resources as well as nurses' educational needs.

Materials and Methods: This descriptive cross sectional study was conducted on the nursing units in Kermanshah in 2003.The members of target population were 100 nurses who provided the direct patient care in their units. Data was collected by a questionnaire which consists of demographic information and questions regarding the objectives of the study. The responses were measured by a single-item Likert scale. After collecting the responses, the data were analyzed by the descriptive statistics(Mean and SD).

Results: A total of one hundred questionnaires were studied in which 37% of them were men and 63% were women, and their mean age was 34.15±5/3 yrs. They had at least ten years of work experiences. 36% of them were single and 64%were married. They spent not only more than 48 hours in continuous nursing education in two past years, but also 5.9 hours monthly. 65% of them used the textbooks, and 68% participated in the conferences to meet the immediate learning needs.

On the whole, the motivation for their participation, obstacles in continuous nursing education and need to this educational programmes were important from their viewpoints.

Conclusion: Offering the best value for continuous nursing education is an important subject .In order to increase nurses' motivation and to minimize the obstacles, we should improve this educational programme by increasing the personnel numbers in the hospitals, decreasing the workload, participating in the continuous nursing education programmes and giving special time for these programmes.