Attitude And Barriers Towards Participation In Continuing Professional Development Programme Among Nurses

Introduction and Background: Continuing professional development programme has become a popular term among professionals in recent years. Professional organizations are exploring continuing professional development programme to monitor accountability and clinical competence. The present study was planned to assess and compare the attitude and barriers towards participation in continuing professional development programme among nurses working in Government and Private Hospitals, Sikkim. Methodology: Investigators adopted the descriptive comparative research design .The 100 nursing staff working in the hospital setup and directly or indirectly engaged in patient care with the qualification of degree /diploma/certificate were recruited through stratified random sampling technique from different wards, outpatient departments and laboratories of government and private hospitals of Sikkim. Structured attitude scale, barrier assessment scale and semi structured questionnaire on identified barrier were used to collect data on nurses attitude and barrier towards participation in continuing professional development programme for which validity and reliability was established. Written informed consent was taken from the respondent prior to the administration of the questionnaire. Result: The analysis of the data indicated that the 7o% of nurses in Government and private hospital displayed a favorable attitude towards continuing professional development programme. The mean positive attitude score was slightly higher among nurses of private hospital (79%) than the mean attitude score of nurses in government hospital (77%) with the mean difference of 1.24 which was not found statistically significant (t=1.037,p>0.05). Nurses working in Government hospital had scored high barriers (62%) towards participation in continuing professional development programme than the private nurses (38%). Conclusion: It was indeed encouraging to see that even in presence of personal and organizational barriers, nurses expressed favorable attitude towards continuing professional development.