RURAL HOME CARE REGISTERED NURSES’ EXPERIENCES WITH CONTINUING NURSING EDUCATION

Abstract

Canadian rural home care nursing is becoming more complex and diverse. Access to continuing nursing education is required to support the provision of safe client care. To date, there has been a limited exploration of this topic. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of rural home care nurses with continuing nursing education. The following question guided this research: What are the experiences of rural home care nurses with continuing nursing education? This study used interpretive description as a method of qualitative inquiry. An integrative literature review was conducted as part of the study forestructure. Following this, snowball and purposive sampling were used to recruit 20 rural home care registered nurses who were employed in a western Canadian province. Key findings from this study contribute to the description of rural home care nursing roles and the degree of autonomy required to provide expert care in the home environment. Rural home care nurses’ experiences with continuing nursing education are impacted by external conditions including Chameleonic Practice (i.e., One-Person Show, Professional Intersection, Becoming their Person), Foundational Instability (i.e., Roadblocks to Learning, Stretched Thin, Rural Repatriation), and Learning Leadership (i.e., Filling the Learning Bucket, Finding a Way, Learning Reciprocity). The COVID-19 pandemic was declared just as the study commenced and participants spoke at length about its effects on them and their work. This presented a serendipitous opportunity for a supplementary secondary analysis of how the pandemic impacted rural home care nurses’ continuing nursing education. Themes identified in this supplementary secondary analysis included: Nurses Must Work, Constant State of Flux, Fear and the Unknown, and Hindsight is Easy. The findings of this study suggest that the continuing nursing education experiences of rural home care nurses is dependent on many conditions. Significant policy changes and updated standards of practice are required to support safe client care through the delivery of evidence informed continuing nursing education. Further to this, recommendations for future pandemic planning are suggested.