Experience and effectiveness of an empowerment-oriented education for public health nurses in Taiwan

The objective of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of an empowerment-oriented education on employee empowerment, job satisfaction, job productivity, and innovation behaviors for public health nurses in Taiwan. The study was a quasi-experimental design; public health nurses in two health bureaus in Northern Taiwan were assigned into an empowerment group (N=31) and a control group (N=29). Empowerment-oriented education lasting 4 weeks, twenty-four hours was consisted of four empowerment curriculums and group workshops for each curriculum designed to operate principles of empowerment into individual work environment. The principles of empowerment using problem-posing strategies were based on the cycle of “dialogue-reflection-action” to stimulate participants to aware of the conditions that constrains their freedom and taking actions to change those conditions. Data were collected at baseline and 4 weeks following intervention. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to analysis the intervention effect. The results in this study showed that the intervention of empowerment education had significant effectiveness on psychological empowerment and subscales of self-efficacy and impact, innovative behavior and work productivity but no effectiveness on organizational empowerment and job satisfaction for public health nurses. The results of this study suggested that health department should hold empowerment education for in-serving education regularly as to improve employee's empowerment and job productivity. Besides this, health department should redesign public health tasks and build communication channels to dismiss the vision and information from organization. For presenting more effectiveness for empowerment, the further studies should add other empowered indicators and combine other research methods.