Attendance indicators for students in long-term nursing courses at a university hospital

Education is a social and universal phenomenon, being essential to the workplace and in a continuing regime. The pursuance of continuing education is common in the Nursing practice. Therefore, this study has the objective of describing the attendance indicators obtained by a Continuing Education Nursing Program at a University Hospital in 2012, in relation to the attendance of the students in long-term courses (greater than 20 hours). These courses are offered to the nursing staff under the pretext of understanding and supporting new health care strategies, which aim at improving the workforce of participants. The work herein is a descriptive, exploratory and retrospective study. During 2012 only three long-term courses were offered, all focused upon the specific needs of the hospital. In order to carry out the attendance evaluation a series of indicators were considered; daily presence percentage, general attendance percentage per student, attendance percentage of approved student, attendance percentage of reproved student, course abandonment percentage and approval percentage. The results showed differences in the attendance rates across all courses, both for those students who were approved as for those who were reproved, although the approval rate did not differ between the courses (40-50%). In the case of the course offered only to nurses, there were no abandonments registered. A noted phenomenon is that over the period the course runs, there also occurs a decrease in the daily attendance percentage on the part of students, thus demonstrating the need to implement new methodologies concerning this problem. Additionally, there occurred an attendance percentage and an approved and reproved percentage differential in results among the three nursing work categories, where nurses presented the highest rates of attendance and approbation. These results can be associated to the workplace position, voluntary participation and absence of liberation criteria for participation, all of which should be investigated in a future scenario. The results demonstrate the need for a methodology that maintains attendance levels across the whole duration of the long-term course, and deals with the presence of different professional categories and functions in the same course, under the intention of improving attendance and results of the long-term courses in continuing education programs.