Exploring the development process of nurse practitioners professional competence

• Main Authors: TSENG SHIH-PING, 曾詩蘋
• Other Authors: 王守玉
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/65711331123133820752

碩士 === 弘光科技大學 === 護理研究所 === 102 === In 2000, Taiwan included specialized professional nurses in the Nurses Law. The Nurse Practitioner Advisory Committee was founded in 2005 to develop comprehensive and specific training programs for Taiwanese specialized professional nurses, officially referred to as nurse practitioners (NP). Since the implementation of the “Nurse Practitioner Certification Exam” in 2006, 3,727 NPs have been certified as of 2012. Although in 2002, the International Council of Nurses proposed that the education level required for the cultivation of NPs should be set as a master’s degree, hospitals still provide most of the NP training in Taiwan. Furthermore, only few studies on the professional competence of clinical nurse practitioners have been published in Taiwan. These studies have explored the perspectives of physicians and nursing supervisors. Therefore, in this study, we investigate the development process of nurse practitioners’professional development. Grounded theory was used as research method. Through this investigation process, purposive sampling was utilized, by focusing nurse their own perspectives on the growth of professional development process. In this study, we interviewed 11 nurse practitioners and comprehensively analyzed the training process of nurse practitioners. The findings indicated that 3 major categories emerge regarding the developmental process of nurse practitioners: (1) self-development motivation, (2) professional developmental process, and (3) the sense of achievement. The core category: a nurse practitioner is to become mature and competent. Based on the findings, we suggest that nurses must be properly trained and comprehensively advised regarding work content and regulation relevant to future practice before choosing this field. Because nurse practitioner learning courses do not provide clinical and practical experience, the clinical-practice guidelines of various departments should be developed. Furthermore, the majority of nurse practitioners claimed that they did not receive appropriate orientation training and that they were required to learn most practices independently. Therefore, we suggest that future studies use quantitative or qualitative methods to obtain data on in-service nurse practitioner experiences regarding the knowledge and skills that they possessed prior to and shortly after becoming nurse practitioners, thereby facilitating future nurse practitioners’clinical practices.