Different Personnel's Perceptions and Recommendations to Advanced Practice Roles at Two Medical Centers---A Qualitative Inquiry

The purpose of this study is to compare administrators, physicians, advanced practice nurses (APN), and staff nurses』 perceptions on role functions and its training process for APN from different medical centers. Investigator selects two medical centers to participate in this study, one private and one public, which have been requested by the Taiwanese Nurses Association for the training of APN. Because research on this topic is limited plus investigator want to understand different personnel』s perceptions on APN』s roles more thoroughly, a qualitative methodology will be used for this proposed study. Purposive sampling will be chosen to select participants for four groups (administrator, physician, APN, and staff nurse). Semi-structured interview guide will be used to conduct one by one in-depth interview with the participants. All interviews will be tape-recorded and transcribe verbatim in order to ensure the credibility of the data. Although the investigator plans to invite only 10 participants for each group, the total numbers of the participant will depend on the saturation of the data. Beside in-depth interview, participant observations as well as field notes will be incorporated for data collection in order to gather not only in-depthly but also meaningful information. By using qualitative analysis, codes and categories will be identified from the interview data and themes will be emerged through constant data analyses. For this two-year qualitative study, investigator will perform a pilot test and collect data from the public medical center in the first year. For the second year, investigator will gather data from the private medical center and also prepare for the research report. Data collection and data analysis will go hand in hand in this qualitative inquiry. NUDIST 6.0 software will be used to manage and organize qualitative data. Finally, cross cases analysis will be done to compare data from different medical centers in order to explore different organizational cultures and its influence on APN』s educational training and its role functions.

Project ID:PC9308-0991
External Project ID:NSC93-2314-B182-061