STAFF DEVELOPMENT IN INFORMATION-DEPENDENT ORGANIZATIONS: AN APPLICATION OF THE INFORMATION AUDIT CONCEPT TO CRITICAL CARE NURSING.
Contributors: University of California, Los Angeles.
Published: 1990
Number of pages: 233
Subjects: Education, Adult and Continuing.; Health Sciences, Nursing.; Information Science.
Description: One of the major human resource development challenges in information dependent organizations, especially those with rapidly changing information bases, is the design of systematic and appropriate programs for professional staff development.

There is probably no organization where reliable information (accurate and confident) by the professional staff is more important than in a modern hospital. Within a hospital setting, there is probably no unit that is more information "sensitive" than in the critical care nursing unit. This article reports the results of a preliminary feasibility study of a technology based information "audit" concept for critical care nursing personnel in hospital organizations. The information base of seventy-eight critical care nursing personnel in five separate health care facilities in the Southern California area were examined using this "information audit" concept. The purpose of the audit was to identify, both individually and collectively, those areas of critical care nursing knowledge that require reinforcement and attention in future professional staff development programs.

The information audit was based on an adaption of the critical care certification examination (CCRN) and was evaluated using both the traditional one dimensional or "Right-Wrong" (recognition only--with guessing) scoring system and a recently developed technology based, and more "information sensitive", two dimensional (recognition plus confidence--with no need to guess) scoring system.

The findings of this study indicate that the information base of the critical care nursing personnel surveyed is generally "unstable" with both low amounts of reliable (accurate and confident) information and, more importantly, "mis-information" with a strong tendency to overvalue information. These findings raise serious questions regarding critical care nurses decision making capacities.

The study concludes with a prospectus of how technology based information audit procedures can be effectively used for designing staff development programs in modern hospital settings. Extensions of the audit concept to other information dependent organizations are also examined.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-01, Section: A, page: 0055.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES, 1990.

School code: 0031.