Mandatory versus voluntary Continuing Professional Education: perspectives from the nursing profession

Continuing Professional Education (CPE) is constantly evolving and is now mandatory in some professions in many countries. In Hong Kong, CPE for nursing profession remains voluntary. This research seeks to gather the perceptions, opinions and voices of nurse practitioners, college leaders and academic experts in Hong Kong if CPE is changed from a voluntary basis to a mandatory regime with the focus on analyzing different aspects of CPE. A literature review was carried out in order to distill the views of international scholars and practitioners, together with a review of policies pertaining to continuing professional development (CPD) and CPE. Furthermore, theoretical and practical implications were discussed, and suggestions for future researchers were made. In order to answer the research questions, a phenomenological qualitative study was conducted on the subject topic. Regarding the conceptual framework, the adult learning theory supplemented by motivation theories were scrutinized and analyzed while discussing the application of CPE. This study will contribute to the issue of CPE particularly as there were hitherto few qualitative studies on this topic. In connection with data collection, various methods were used, including individual interviews and focus groups, with participants recruited via (1) contact lists searched from the Internet, university directories, publications; (2) participants in relevant CPE courses for nurses. The study focuses on three cohort studies across time with a group of people who shared a similar characteristic and experience, involving 22 participants in total. 18 face-to-face individual interviews and 4 focus groups were organized. To probe the research questions, voices and opinions were collected from individual interviews. The data were transcribed, analyzed and organized by inter alia classifying by keywords and phrases. All the key concepts were coded, a technique helping to search for the relevant data to answer the research questions. Through feedback from participants on the findings, 10 key meaningful themes were successively derived from participants’ voices, opinions and answers. The results show that eleven participants were rather favorable to voluntary CPE at present. They doubted that mandatory CPE to some extent may bring along pressure and problems like labor shortage rather than professional and personal growth. On the other hand, the head of the nursing faculty of one of the universities in Hong Kong had no preference for adopting mandatory or voluntary CPE, while asserting that nurses should be self-disciplined and self-checking was necessary. In contrast, ten participants were slightly favorable to mandatory CPE in the long run for improving professional standards, provided that certain coordination and support would be given by employers