Continuing nursing education is necessary for all nurses. It is often associated with better patient outcomes. It enables the nurses to convert evidence from research into practice with relative ease. Continuing nursing education can be quite a costly venture because the nurses often need to travel to the venue of a workshop or a seminar at the expense of the hospital. It is also time consuming given that the nurses have to stop attending to the patients and dedicate considerable amount of time to studying.
Impact of continuing nursing education
Evaluations have been carried out through interviews and surveys in order to evaluate the impact of continuing education on the attitudes and the knowledge possessed by nurses. During one study, it was found that the perception of nurses towards change considerably improved as a result of continuing nursing education. This was found to be particularly useful in instances when the hospitals from which the nurses were drawn had to introduce new procedures or make improvements to the procedures that the nurses have been carrying out.
Literature also suggests that continuing nursing education is one of the factors that are responsible for improved patient outcomes due to the enhancement of the knowledge that is possessed by the nurses. In an audit measurement that was carried out which took an account of the impact of nursing quality care following continuing education programs, it was found that the patients received nursing care of better quality following the programs.
In spite of the positive impact of continuing nursing education on nurses, there lacks consensus among scholars as to the exact nature and extent of the impact of continuing nursing education. More studies should therefore be carried out on the subject in order to come up with more exact measures of the impact.
References
American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2009). The clinical nurse leader: developing a new nurse. Retrieved August 11, 2013, from aacn: www . aacn .nche . edu / cnl / index . htm
Gallagher, L. (2007). Continuing education in nursing: A concept analysis. The Journal of Continuing nursing education , 466-473.
Karaman, S. (2011). Nurses' perceptions of online continuing education. BMC Medical Education , np.
Yousefi, H., & Sabouhi, M. N. (2012). Reviewing the effects of an educational program about sepsis care on knowledge, attitude, and practice of nurses in intensive care units. Iran Journal of Nursing and Midwifery , 91-92.
