Use of the Internet for Nurse Education
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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The US Census Bureau estimated that 35 million Americans will be 65 years or older by 2000. Many of these elderly persons will spend some part of their lives in a nursing home, and although the quality of nursing home care varies greatly, generally the quality is understood to be inadequate. Time constraints on nurses often prevent them from the usual means of keeping up with the latest medical information. However, exploitation of the intrinsic quickness of the Internet and its easily accessible, up-to-date information offers the potential to improve care through nursing education. The objective of this proposal is to provide Internet access to a multiethnic, multicultural population of registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical nurses (LPNs) in a nonprofit community nursing home, the Miami Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged (MJHHA), thereby enabling the nurses to increase their knowledge of geriatric syndromes, learn about best practices, and thus improve the care they and others in the nursing home provide to the elderly. This project will be undertaken by investigators affiliated with the Stein Gerontological Institute (SGI), the academic arm of MJHHA. We hypothesize that increased access to and training for the Internet will improve the knowledge and attitudes of nurses at MJHHA and thus lead to improved quality of care for the nursing home residents over time. This proposal requires the broader bandwidth connection of a T1, which provides the capability of using the Internet for interactive training exercises. This has been shown to have a greater impact on knowledge, attitude, and behavior in studies on continuing education. Three specific aims will be accomplished by this project: 1) To provide larger bandwidth Internet access to the clinical nursing staff working at MJHHA. (Existing Internet access is limited to supervisors); 2) To train the nursing staff in the convenient and maximal use of the Internet, and 3) To monitor and report on the nurses' use of the Internet, in terms of user age, ethnicity, and time and purpose of use, and to determine if there is any association between these factors and Internet use in this population. A secondary aim is to measure nurses' satisfaction, with the Internet and with the job, to see if there is an increase in satisfaction over time, and to see if there is any decrease in turnover among the nurses with access to the Internet. Insight will be gained into use of the Internet among a population of nurses. New information about the use of the Internet for education in long-term care facilities and eventual benefits for improved patient care might ensue from this project.
