Browsing by Author "Virtapuro, Anni"

The purpose of the study was to examine the professional expertise and it’s development in the field of health care, which is an operational environment characterized by daily rush and ever-changing professional requirements. The study analyzed the importance of continuing professional education in the development of expertise. The study also examined the challenges resulting from the COVID-19 for nurses’ competence development. The study was carried out in collaboration with a company offering web-based courses for customer companies in the social and health care sector. The aim of this study was to provide practical information, based on nurses’ experiences, of how the professional development of nurses can effectively be improved by continuing professional education - how should the trainings be planned and built to be relevant in developing health care expertise? The study relied on qualitative methods and the data was collected using a semi-structured theme interview. The research material consisted of individual interviews of eight (N=8) health care workers of which seven work as nurses and one works as urotherapist. They were from four different Finnish hospital districts. The interviews were carried out remotely. The data was analyzed by using qualitative content and theme analysis. The results suggested that continuous development of expertise in the health care sector is essential for coping with work, as the operational environment changes every day and one have to keep up with the change. Expertise was perceived to develop in daily work but the importance of continuing professional education was also recognized. The results suggested that attending training is often difficult due to urgency, and more training opportunities were needed. The daily rush was also perceived to affect one’s own coping, especially in terms of training – attending continuing professional education was considered important, but the challenges of work itself reduced the enthusiasm to participate training. The ubiquity of COVID-19 was perceived as stressful and it was felt to have brought even faster and greater changes to the work environment, which was perceived to require an even faster ability to adapt and learn new things.