Educational Need Assessment of Advanced Practice Nurses on the Pathophysiology

Purpose: Knowledge on pathophysiology is important to understand diseases and patient conditions and also in providing advanced nursing care. This study was performed to investigate the present situation, knowledge, and educational need on pathophyiology of advanced practice nurses (APN). Method: Eighty-four APN, who is practicing in hospitals nationwide, were surveyed with structured questionnaires developed by researchers. The questionnaire were composed of 109 items with 4 point scales with the contents of general characteristics, educational experience on pathophyisology, educational need, and knowledge on major and subcategories of pathophysiology. Result: The 77.1% of APN had experience of taking pathophysiology lecture and the lecturer were mainly medical doctors (39.8%) and APN (32.4%). The 61.5% of APN answered that the knowledge on pathophysiology was helpful and 97.6% of APN thought pathphysiologic education is needed in clinical practice. Seven major categories of pathophysiology showed higher scores were water imbalance, heart diseases, hemodynamic disorders, arterial vessel disorders, electrolyte imbalance, diseases of the digestive system, and diseases of the respiratory systems. Educational needs on the major and subcategories of pathphysiology were different by the field of APN and also by the clinical experiences as APN. APN also responded that there is a necessity to change the present curricular more specific to each practice field and more focus on the clinical practice. Conclusion: It was confirmed that educational and clinical need' on the pathophysiology is very high and there is urgent need to change current curricular more specific to the field of APN and also clinical practice. This survey will help to identify and clarify the areas of change and to improve the education for the APN.본 연구는 2006년도 대한기초간호자연과학회 정책연구비 지원으로 수행되었음