A collaborative evaluation of college and hospital critical care nursing programs in Ontario

The standardized curriculum should be developed under the auspices of the Critical Care Nursing Subcommittee in close collaboration with the Canadian Association of Critical Care Nurses (CACCN), the formal education institutions and the hospitals with whom they work. [...] One of the main recommendations from the Final Report of the Ontario Critical Care Steering Committee (2005, March) was that “professional staff working in critical care should be required to meet provincially recognized standards and core competencies.” The Committee also identified the need for consistency of nurse training in critical care to support the recruitment and retention of critical ca [...] The objectives of the study were to: •. Gain stakeholder input into the new standards including their relevance to practice and education, the enablers and challenges to implementing them and how to evaluate the programs to determine the extent to which the standards exist in current programs. [...] In the training session, the 8 experts were given a detailed explanation of the study, a description of their role as expert reviewers, an in-depth overview of the survey instrument and a brief session on the use of intraclass correlation co-efficient to determine inter-rater reliability in the review process. [...] The expert reviewers could only evaluate curricula/programs on the information provided in the curricula submissions and did not have the same level of familiarity with the curricula as the self-evaluators.