Philip Onuoha, Denise Israel-Richardson and Chidum Ezenwaka
Aim: To assess nurses’ participation in continuing medical education (CME) in Trinidad and Tobago.
Methods: 1,032 of the estimated 1,443 qualified nurses employed in the services of the Regional Health Authorities between November 2011 and April 2012 completed the self-administered research questionnaire previously pre-tested on a cohort of student nurses. The questionnaires did not contain any personal identifiers but were serially numbered to avoid receiving duplicate copies from a participant. The questionnaires were distributed to all public hospitals and health centres within the regional health authorities. The head nurse in each facility assisted in the distribution and collection of completed questionnaires from the volunteers.
Results: 1,032 nurses participated in the study. About 55.4% of the nurses were ignorant of CME. Of the 44.4% that knew about CME, only 25.9% of have had the privilege of attending some CME activities (p<0.05). Again, of the 25.9% of the nurses that have attended some CME activities, most (91%) were within the country while only 5.7% CME activities were outside the Caribbean (p< 0.05). Interestingly, 86.7% of the nurses would like to participate in CME activities out of which 63.8% would like to be identified as specialist nurses if given the opportunity.
Conclusions: This study has shown that while a small percentage of nurses previously participated in CME activities, a significant majority (87%) indicated interest to participate in the future and even become specialist nurses. We therefore advocate that nurses’ employment contracts should include incentives for continuing professional education to encourage future development of nursing profession.