Jane E Binetti
Carolinas HealthCare System, USA
Title: Impact of an electronic certification toolkit on nurses’ intent to certify
Biography
Biography: Jane E Binetti
Abstract
Statement: Certification is used as a standard to recognize clinical and professional competence in nurses. Along with validation of knowledge, certification supports lifelong learning, and professional development. In addition, literature suggests nurses who earned certification experienced increased job satisfaction, improved patient outcomes, professional recognition and personal pride (2014). Despite its benefits, many barriers prevent nurses from seeking certification. Cost, time, anxiety, lack of administrative support and financial incentives, and even difficulty accessing information and maintenance are reported barriers. It is important to implement creative strategies to minimize obstacles to certification. The use of toolkits provides availability, ease of use, and the ability to promote learning, disseminate knowledge, and encourage engagement in practice at no cost. The purpose of this project was to introduce an electronic toolkit to address barriers to certification and to measure whether use of the toolkit affected nurses’ intent to certify.
Methods: The project was guided by Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which contends that behavior is predicated by intention and measured by three components: behavioral norms, social norms, and perceived control. A pretest-posttest intervention using an author-developed tool was used to determine change in “intent to certify” among certification-eligible RNs on a medical-surgical unit at a large urban teaching hospital. After 3-months of intranet access to an author-designed electronic toolkit that addressed barriers to certification, nurses repeated the tool to see if their intention had changed.
Results: Mean aggregate scores slightly increased at post-test for subjective and behavioral norms, and slightly decreased for perceived control.
Conclusion: An increase in two of three components of intention suggests that the toolkit has potential to be user friendly; cost effective was to increase nurses’ intent to certify.