Assessing the Faculty Development Needs in Nursing Colleges of Khyber Pakhtunkhawa: A Cross Sectional Study

Abstract

Nursing faculty are the key players in shaping the students by providing quality education. Faculty development is a crucial element of nursing education, and need assessment is fundamental and initial step for planning effective faculty development programs. Objective: To identify the needs of nursing faculty to facilitate teaching at Baccalaureate level in Nursing Colleges Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Methods: A Descriptive Cross-sectional study was carried out in KPK in 2022. Overall, 242 participants from 14 colleges were involved in the study. Sample size was calculated through Raosoft software with 95% confidence interval, 5% margin of error, 50% hypothesized prevalence and 650 population. An adopted questionnaire was used to collect the data, its Cronbach’s alpha score is 0.968. The Questionnaires were filled by the faculty. The questionnaire had two sections; demographic section and faculty responses. Data were analyzed through SPSS version-22. Results: Out of 242 faculty, 238 completed the questionnaire with a response rate of 98.34%.  Majority of the participants were male (66%), most of the participants (70%) were > 50years of age, the largest proportion being lecturers (82.8%) and 69% participants were with <3years of teaching experience. The common teaching activities practiced by the participants were lecture (81.1%). The finding showed that the participants were having moderate to lower level of knowledge in four components. Conclusions: The priority areas identified for faculty development were OSCE, PBL, selecting assessment instrument for students’ evaluation, IT and computer skills. This study reinforces the need for effective faculty development program to train the faculty in these identified areas.