Staff Development Project Summary
In today’s environment of exponential advancements in knowledge and technology, a concept known as the learning organization (LO) is becoming increasingly important to health care institutions (Marquis & Huston, 2012). The LO philosophy embraces the importance of learning as a continuous process and emphasizes that in order for hospitals to adapt to changes in the environment and be successful, they must create staff development programs. Nurse educators are the primary hospital resource for generating such educational programs. This summary will describe the steps to follow when planning an effective staff development program, which include assessing learning needs, selecting a learning theory, developing learning objectives, presenting learning content, and evaluating learning.
Assessment of Learning Needs In order for the teaching-learning process to be effective, an assessment of learning needs must first occur (Kearney-Nunnery, 2012, pp. 162-176). Performing an analysis of learning needs will identify knowledge gaps and skill deficits and enable the educator to select the most relevant topics when creating staff development programs. Research has shown that questionnaires are a reliable method to collect this type of information (Doughty, 2012). To analyze and determine learning needs of nurses in the intensive care unit where I work, a questionnaire composed of two parts was used. The first part consisted of five questions related to clinical procedure topics for which nurses had potential knowledge deficits or interests. The second part addressed the preferences of delivery methods for educational content. Fifteen of the twenty nurses who received the questionnaire responded and the majority of respondents agreed they needed further knowledge of a procedure known as rapid sequence intubation (RSI). With