Meeting Nursing Staff Education through Learning Need Assessment

Nursing workforce needs continuous education in order to maintain their current knowledge and skills. Nurses’ learning needs could be assessed through several tools and strategies. The aim of this study is to identify nurses ‘s (at all levels) deficits in knowledge and skills through conducting a learning need assessment tool and meet their educational needs in order to enable them practicing safe, effective, deemed competent and efficient patient care. Method: A descriptive quantitative and qualitative design adapting an Education Needs Assessment Model. Instrument used was anonymous SurveyMonkey and target population was all nurses at different levels working at King Fahad Specialist Hospital, Dammam, and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The survey was constructed through literatures utilizing multiple database such as Pubmed and CINAHL and then through meetings the expert educators and stakeholders. The survey contained nine (9) educational domains that would identify their learning deficits using Likert scale. The survey was piloted to examine both face validity and content validity and then IRB approval was granted from the hospital. Results: Data were collected and analyzed following descriptive analysis frequency statistics using Excel Spreadsheet. Response rate was 34% although the targeted response rate was 67%. Nurses with all levels and from all divisions with various years of experience had identified their learning needs on the nine domains. The major performance gap was related to research utilization and Evidence Based Practice. Another gap was found in Leadership and Management Courses to support their nurse leaders. The study recommended that nurse educators have to look at the quality of clinical teaching when they conduct inservice educational sessions in terms of when to conduct it, which learning style to adopt, where to conduct it and for how long. Conclusion: Survey Monkey is a comprehensive learning assessment tool used to identify current nurses’ knowledge and skills. Further studies and researches using different designs and instruments are strongly needed.