Determination of Content of a Surgical Nurse Internship Program

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Descriptions of nurse internships have reflected a broad diversity of schemes in content, objectives and outcomes. The paucity of research about most aspects of the program supported the need to investigate the content. It was vitally important that the curriculum for the internship program be cogent to the developmental needs of the nurse interns.

The primary Purpose of this study was to determine the essential content of a surgical nurse internship program. Five groups of nurses ranked and weighted 68 topics which were organized into five categories: professional, personal, patient/family, broad clinical and surgical nursing. Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance was utilized to determine the agreement within each of the five nurse groups, between the nurse groups and among all nurses. The chi square test was applied to determine the level of significance of the agreement. Rank and weight standing of each topic by each nurse group and of all nurses was obtained.

There was significantly high agreement among all nurses in ranking topics of all five categories. All nurse groups had the highest agreement in ranking the professional and personal topics. There was a moderately high agreement in ranking broad clinical and surgical nursing and moderate agreement in ranking patient/family categories. Only one group of nurses, the associate degree faculty had a moderate agreement within their group in selecting appropriate topics. Other nurses had a low agreement within their groups in ranking the 68 topics. Of all ten between groupings, the nursing

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