A Questionnaire for Assessing Community Health Nurses’ Learning Needs.

Akhtar-Danesh, Noori; Valaitis, Ruta K.; Schofield, Ruth; Underwood, Jane; Martin-Misener, Ruth; Baumann, Andrea; Kolotylo, Camille

Learning needs assessment is an important stage of every educational process that aims to inform changes in practice and policy for continuing professional development. Professional competencies have been widely used as a basis for the development of learning needs assessment. The Canadian Community Health Nursing Standards of Practices (CCHN Standards) were released in 2003. However, it is not known whether community health nurses (CHNs) have the educational background to enable them to meet these standards. This article reports on the development of a learning needs assessment questionnaire for CHNs. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to examine the consistency of factors underpinning the CCHN Standards. Also, validity and reliability of the questionnaire were evaluated using appropriate techniques. This process resulted in a valid and reliable CHN learning needs assessment questionnaire to measure learning needs of large groups of practitioners, where other forms of measurement cannot be feasibly conducted.

CANADA; ANALYSIS of variance; COMMUNITY health nursing; CONFIDENCE intervals; STATISTICAL correlation; EXPERIMENTAL design; FACTOR analysis; HEALTH promotion; RESEARCH methodology; NURSE practitioners; NURSES; NURSES' attitudes; CONTINUING education of nurses; POSTAL service; QUESTIONNAIRES; RESEARCH evaluation; RESEARCH funding; RESPONSIBILITY; STATISTICAL sampling; SCALE analysis (Psychology); TRANSLATIONS; SAMPLE size (Statistics); EDUCATIONAL attainment; INFORMATION needs; RESEARCH methodology evaluation; EVALUATION

Western Journal of Nursing Research, 2010, Vol 32, Issue 8, p1055

0193-9459

Academic Journal

10.1177/0193945910373600