Community health nurses role, work contents, and nurses learning needs assessment in Southwest China

19^th Global Nursing Education Conference

April 27-28, 2017 Las Vegas, USA

Lin Tao, Suzhen Liu and Jiping Li

Sichuan University, China

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Nurs Care

Abstract :

Background: The cost of curing chronic diseases has been the present growth trend. And, improving the health promotion and healthcare management may have achieved significant results in terms of population health maintenance. How to make the community health nurses' role full play and establish a comprehensive education development plan had been the concern of the Chinese Government. Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate community health nurses' role, work contents, and explore the reasonable teaching methods by knowing nurses� learning needs. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional design using self-answered questionnaires comprising demographic questions and three scales measuring actual role, work content and teaching needs scale was used. Results: 1,015 community health nurses in 56 CHS centers were cluster sampled. Findings showed that the community nurses mainly undertook the roles of health educator (94.0%), health care giver (84.9%), collaborator and coordinator (78.5%), observer (73.9%), manager and organizer (52.3%), but seldom undertook advocate role (48.4%), leadership role (27.7%) and research role (32.3%). And, there were five most important work contents: Health education (84.4%), providing care for patient directly (71.4%), community-based prevention (70.1%), chronic disease management (69.6%) and elderly healthcare (66.5%). This presents a problem for community nursing education: lacking of related ability such as advocating for residents, leadership skills and scientific research skills are perceived as the greatest need. Nurses preceptors also need to improve teaching related to maternal healthcare, child healthcare, mental rehabilitation, family health nursing and hospice care. Conclusions: For community health nurses in China to function perfect, making best use of interactive teaching methodologies and encouraging nurses in community based research projects helped a lot to improve individual quality and ability. Meanwhile, encourage nurses in family health survey and learn to do community diagnosis contributed to take good care of vulnerable groups.

Biography :

Lin Tao is working in School of Nursing, West China Hospital, Sichuan University. Her main research direction is Community Care. She has taken part in 2 international nursing conferences, which were held in Singapore and Thailand.

Email: 383528815@qq.com