Learning Effect of the Public Health Nursing Study Group: Continuing Professional Development(CPD)

Public health nursing expertise have been changing, the government explore an educational program model of PHN and re-define at the country level in Japan. On current local government become aggressive about downsizing and trend toward outsourcing, public health nursing have been changing too. It is expected that present PHN must create and improve the expertise. So it is the most important to enhance the development of on-the-job training and CPD that is urgent issue. But recently it is so difficult to set up or spend the time to supervise and learn each other, because amount of work increased. Therefore off duty hours, we held the Study Group for 4years, we had various theme concerned with PHN work, collaborated with professor of university, faculty of nursing.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the learning effect of the Study Group. We analyze 121reflection sheets which are the comments freely written by all participants after the each study. The result obtained five consistently-detectable categories in each, 1) increasing self-efficacy, 2) information exchange, 3) knowledge acquirement, 4) analytic thinking, 5) professional sense of ethic. These are the significant elements of expertise of PHN and CPD. It shows the learning on this study group include and/or derive expertise for participants. In conclusion, Learning Effect of the Public Health Nursing Study Group are effective for participants' expertise and CPD. Future, I need to verify a number of hypotheses more detail, and improve the system of our study group and develop an educational model.