Study of the Nurses'' Role Identity of Nursing Practioners and their Willingness to Transfer –Example of Southern Regional and District Hospitals

• Main Authors: Hui-Fen Liu, 劉惠芬
• Other Authors: Yong-Yuan Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/66858426120447351381

碩士 === 高雄醫學大學 === 醫務管理暨醫療資訊學系碩士在職專班 === 105 === Objectives To deal with the shortage of doctors and also promote the development of nursing profession, the nurse practitioner system, which was designed to help in caring patient, was setup in 1998. Since then many medical institutes trained and promoted senior nurses as nurse practitioners. However, even if more and more resources were spent in training nurse practitioners, the number of nurse practitioners does not increase correspondingly. The goal of this study is to understand the job recognition of nurse practitioners from the perspective of a nursing staff and figure out the factors which may affect a nurse taking the role of being a nurse practitioner. Methods In this study, a cross-sectional structured questionnaire survey was conducted in a regional hospital of the southern Taiwan. The survey was targeted to those nursing staff in a clinical unit with a specialist nursing staff, including nurse practitioner, deputy care worker and deputy nurse practitioner. A total of 355 questionnaires were disturbed and 343 copies of answered questionnaires were received. A scale to measure the job recognition and capability of nurse practitioner was used in the data collection. This study was reviewed by the Human Body Test Committee and the content of the questionnaire was also reviewed by five experts for expert content validity. The average CVI was 0.963 and before running the survey, the internal consistency reliability coefficient (Cronbach''s ɑ) was 0.847 ~ 0.975. The survey data were analyzed by SPSS 20.0 (Chinese version) to do the statistical analysis – t-test, F-test, Pearson correlation and complex regression analysis. Results The results show that the job recognition of being nurse practitioners is 80.0% especially for the active and passive patient care (p = 0.015). Marriage (p = 0.019) and job satisfaction (p < 0.0005) are the major factors in determining the job recognition. On the other hand, age plays an important role (p = 0.002) in determining the willingness to be nurse practitioner -- the higher the age is, the larger the impact on the willingness. Furthermore, those with higher capability in active patient caring (p = 0.015), higher leadership (p = 0.021) and quality monitoring capability (p = 0.038) are more willing to be nurse practitioners. Moreover, salary is a critical factor for a nursing staff to consider to take the role of being nurse practitioners (p = 0.050). Increasing salary can help to attract nursing staff to be nurse practitioners. Conclusion and suggestions The study finds that age, salary and job recognition of nurse practitioners were critical factors for a nursing staff to take the role of nurse practitioners. Under the medical and nursing mutual cooperation, the job scope of nurse practitioners varies. It actually depends on the working environment, available resources and other’s job recognition toward nurse practitioners, etc. Should nurse practitioners can involve in medical and health policy planning, this can raise the profession of nurse practitioners and increase their salary correspondingly. This can then in turn help to attract more nursing staff to be nurse practitioners. This study is based on a cross-sectional structured questionnaire survey, which requests the interviewees to answer the questions. The content of the questionnaire is designed for general nurse practitioners. Thus, the study may not be specific enough to those nurse practitioners working in some specific sections. Actually, nurse practitioners in some specific section are irreplaceable. Thus, in the future study, the questionnaires should take the job nature into account to quantitatively analyze the willingness of being a nurse practitioner. With this enhancement, the study can provide constructive suggestions to the policy planners.