Surveying training needs of nursing staff of Razi Hospital, Torbat Heydarieh Iran through ISO 10015 standard in 2018

Nurses are the largest group of medical caregivers in the world. Having highly capable nurses in a healthcare system is directly associated with more favorable outcomes for patients. The rapid development of new medical procedures and equipment necessitates constantly developing new skills and competencies. Thus one of the effective means towards their efficient training is to identify and assess their educational needs. The purpose of this investigation is to study educational needs of nurses by ISO 10015 method.

A descriptive survey research was designed surveying all of the nursing staff of Razi Hospital of Torbat Heydarieh. At the first stage of the study, necessary competencies and skills were identified using two methods of Delphi and job analysis, and then educational needs assessment was done according to ISO 10015 steps. The tools used were researcher designed questionnaires and their reliability and validity were tested by achieving a Cronbach's alpha of 83.9%, and by content validity method, respectively. Data analysis was done using version 16 of SPSS software.

Three hundred and sixty-one skills were identified and were categorized into three categories of general (48 skills), specialized (303 skills), and management (10 skills). Nurses had acceptable competencies in 312 of the identified skills, while there were educational and structural gaps found in 8 general, 36 specialized and 5 management skills, as well as the solutions to overcome the gaps were proposed by a group of experts. At the end, 7 general, 33 specialized and 5 management skills were identified and recorded as knowledge gaps.

In this study we found out that the specialized skills are the most important educational needs (ABG interpretation, ventilator settings, and cardiac arrhythmias for nurses; and staff and patients’ needs assessment for head nurses) followed by general nursing skills (hemovigilance), and management skills (quality management). The identified knowledge gaps were considered in planning for the future trainings of the study population.