Ranking in-Service Training Courses of Nursing with Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach

The first step for planning the training of nurses is to determine the priority of training needs. In fact, it is the first factor in creating and guaranteeing the effectiveness of training and improvement. The aim of this study was to determine the priority of in-service training courses of nursing at Babol University of Medical Sciences with a multi-criteria decision-making approach.

This research is a cross-sectional study. 18 participants were included in the study by stratified random sampling method among nurses, nursing managers, supervisors and supervisors working in hospitals covered by Babol University of Medical Sciences. The details of all in-service training courses were collected using a questionnaire and 21 courses were identified after removing non-shared courses. After a literature review and semi-structured interviews, we identified 15 influential indicators for choosing these courses. Using a valid and reliable questionnaire, the pairwise comparison of these criteria relative to each other, as well as the pairwise comparison between the clases were done and then, applying the method of analytical hierarchy process, the ranking of courses was done based on both importance and necessity. Data analysis was done using Expert Choice-11 and SPSS-12 software.

The results show that patient safety courses (0.078) and drug forms and how to prescribe them (0.014) and also, patient safety courses (0.091) and brain CT scan interpretation for nurses (0.017), have the highest and lowest ranks based on importance and necessity, respectively.

Although there is a slight difference in the rank of some of the identified courses, in general, the courses that get high ranks are almost the same in both cases (importance and necessity). Therefore, in order to create and guarantee the effectiveness of training and its improvement for nurses, the planners of in-service courses and the training supervisors can first rank the courses based on their importance and necessity and then organize the courses in order to be more practical, effective and affordable for nurses.