“I Am Not Alone”: Development and Effectiveness Evaluation of an Online Social Network Intervention for Newly Graduated Male Nurses (Continued Project)

With the practice rate of male nurse continues to increase rapidly in Taiwan, more and more newly graduated male nurse are entering the clinical nursing job. The transition from school to nursing workplace is the most stressful and the highest turnover rate was found in previous studies. Social support groups have been widely used in nursing research and hospital and are effective to decrease job stress, burnout, and increase intention to nursing career persistence of nurses. However, all of these social support groups used face-to-face method, are limited in time, place, number of participants and are non-anonymous. It is difficult to popularize and be interested by newly graduated male nurses who are worked in different hospitals and belong to the internet generation. A highly accepted, cost-effective, accessible, and innovative online social network may benefit for newly graduated male nurses. This 3-year longitudinal prospective study aims to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of an online social network intervention for newly graduated male nurses. This research is funded one year by Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology in 2018 and mainly conducts needs assessment of online social network intervention and confirms the influence of social support on the nursing career persistence. Preliminary research results show that online social network intervention is accepted and feasible on newly graded male nurse. Most newly graded male nurses (84.6%) are willing to participate in this online social network and their interested issues are about nursing competence promotion, career development and career promotion. Also, direct and indirect highly positive impacts of social support on nursing career persistence are showed on structural equation model (p ＜0.001). This 2 stage (2 years) continued study is to keep supporting the research and development proposals in following stage. In first stage (the first year), the social network intervention will be developed based on the preliminary research results and the content and application of the intervention will be tested by mixed method. In second stage (the second year), a prospective randomised controlled trial will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of an online social network intervention for newly graduated male nurses. One hundred and seventy newly graduated male nurses will be recruited (85 for the intervention group and 85 for the control group). The data of resilience, job stress, role strain, nursing professional commitment and intention to nursing career persistence will be collected with structured questionnaires before intervention, and then again on 3, 6, 12 months after first intervention. The data of repeat measures will be analyzed using General Estimating Equation and Hierarchical Linear Modeling. This is the first online social network social support intervention study for nurses all over the world. The social network intervention developed in this study may used in clinical nursing providing a supportive environment for male nurse and be benefit for nursing career persistence of male nurse.

Project ID:PC10907-1305
External Project ID:MOST109-2314-B182-059