Learning Needs Assessment

A learning needs assessment (LNA) is an important step in the planning process, as it can help determine what educational activities are designed for the purposes of enhancing learning outcomes, improving patient outcomes, and optimizing cost-effectiveness of organizational resources (Pilcher, 2016). New graduates do not possess adequate work experience; this prompts the need to identify their weaknesses and strengths. Identifying strengths and weaknesses enable nursing educators to develop a curriculum or teaching plan that addresses the training needs of each student (Fares, Dumit, & Dhaini, 2020). This is important since nursing deals with multiple-disciplines that is not limited to giving patients drugs but covers other important areas such as effective communication, empathizing, following instructions, working with other medical staff from various departments, and the patients to deliver quality healthcare. Developing an effective data collection strategy that gathers all the information of the student's level of preparedness is key to training effective nurses who can transform the delivery of nursing services (Fares, Dumit, & Dhaini, 2020).

Explanation on Data Collection Techniques

The assessment questions are the immediate step towards collecting relevant data necessary to determine the new nurses preparedness to function independently. The second step requires the formulation of effective data collection strategies. As an instructor, obtaining primary data or information is important in this exercise. The instructor should assign the newly hired nurses’ duties within the hospital and gather data by observing how they discharge their duties (Fares, Dumit, & Dhaini, 2020). The instructor or the educator should observe the nurses' composure and how they handle pressure while working in a multi-disciplinary team. The instructor should observe the nurses’ attitudes while talking to the patients and other medical staff to establish their attitude and level of patience. Observing how the nurses’ handle stubborn patients to determine if they can control such situations and win such patients to cooperate helps gauge their communication skills (Fares, Dumit, & Dhaini, 2020).

Other data collection techniques include listening to the nurses’ as they care for patients, which helps determine their communication skills. Going through the records prepared by the nurses’ is a fast and accurate way of establishing if the records are properly collected and recorded as required. These methods enable the instructor to gain fast-hand information on the new nurses’ abilities to discharge their duties as professional nurses (Fares, Dumit, & Dhaini, 2020). Administering a semi-structured questionnaire to obtain information on the students’ perception of the nursing orientation is another way of collecting data. The nurses should fill in their understanding of patient safety and quality healthcare delivery and briefly describe how they can contribute to patient safety and quality healthcare. The semi-structured questionnaire provides room for the newly hired nurses to prove their nursing knowledge to the instructor, making it easy for the instructor to determine the accuracy of information filled in the questionnaires as they require the students to give further explanation on their answers (Fares, Dumit, & Dhaini, 2020).

Deploying the use of a balanced scorecard to measure the performance of the newly hired nurses in all the perimeters of nursing over a given period is another effective data collection strategy. The newly hired nurses’ performance is then evaluated based on their performance over a certain period; this enables the instructor to rate the newly hired nurses in each area throughout the assessment. This is an effective data collection method as the instructor obtains non-biased feedback as the instructor personally rates the students based on their actual performance and not from the theoretical knowledge. This approach requires more time to observe and evaluate each student as they discharge various nursing duties (Fares, Dumit, & Dhaini, 2020).

How to Use the Data Collected in this Learning Needs Assessment

After gathering data from each nurse, the instructor analyses gathered data to establish the weaknesses of each newly recruited nurse. The instructor develops a table on the specific areas that require improvement for each nurse and designs a training regime focused on improving the specifically identified areas (Saqr, Fors, & Tedre, 2017). The training regime table serves as a reference point to help re-evaluate the nurses’ after completing the new training focused on addressing their weaknesses to establish if they have improved and ready to offer quality nursing services. The data collected can as be used to improve the nursing curriculum. The instructor identifies common areas of weaknesses from the analysis and designs a suitable lesson or course to address such areas to enable nurses to acquire all the training they need to offer quality nursing services (Saqr, Fors, & Tedre, 2017).

Reference

Fares, S., Dumit, N. Y., & Dhaini, S. R. (2020). Basic and continuing education needs of nurses

instrument: development and validation. International nursing review, 67(1), 92-100.

Pilcher, J. (2016). Learning needs assessment. Journal for Nurses in Professional Development, 32(4), 185–191. https://doi.org/10.1097/nnd.0000000000000245

Saqr, M., Fors, U., & Tedre, M. (2017). How learning analytics can early predict under-

achieving students in a blended medical education course. Medical teacher, 39(7), 757-767.