A New Model For In-Service Education In A Public Hospital: Web-Based Distance Education

Abstract

The unprecedented developments in information and communication technologies, together with other developments, such as increased prevalence of the internet, limited time of individuals allocated to face-to-face health trainings, and the enhanced availability of accessing web-based information have increased the indispensability of web-based educations. Web-based educations, compared to traditional educations, are more flexible and interactive for adult training, and therefore become preferable alternatives for education. In this study, within the scope of life-long learning, it is aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of web-based in-service education given to the nurses. The sample of this study was based on the nurses working in a research and education hospital in Sakarya. After obtaining the necessary permissions, between June 2013 and December 2013, it was planned to give the subjects of "Clinical Microbiology, Hospital Infections, Hand Hygiene, BloodBorne Infection, and Hospital Cleaning and Waste Management", under the main title of "Infection Protection", which was involved in the in-house education program. The participants in the study were given standard username and password by the program managers. Username was set to the first five digits of national identity number. In order to solve user problems and respond to interface page, in which the technical problems are reported, researchers were given to one-day education in distance education center (DEC). The participants were asked to answer four questions both before the each education subject and after the each education subject, and participants got score of 50 or above were evaluated as successful. It was seen that the number of correct answers given by majority of the nurses was increased after the education, and this difference was found to be statistically significant (p<0.05) (Table 1). Distance education, which dates back to the first quarter of 20 th century, has created competition in traditional education through combining different education materials in different settings. Today, health education is also transferred to web-environment through the increasing developments in information technologies. In this direction, it is possible to suggest that in-service education might also be transferred to web-environment due to the potential benefits offered by information technologies.