A Foundation Course in Stoma Care: The Ward Nurses Experience

Title

A Foundation Course in Stoma Care:The Ward Nurses Experience.

Background

In 2009, a foundation course in stoma care was developed by an ostomy company. It comprises of an interactive CDRom with workbook, along with a practical one day workshop, that has  been accredited by the Royal College of Nursing in the UK. This course was presented to the UK stoma care specialist nurses in February 2009. This filled us with great enthusiasm to be able to offer this to our ward base nurses over our two hospital sites. Our hospitals had the greatest number of nurses participating on the course.

Objective

To evaluate how relevant the Foundation Course was to the ward nurses, who had varying levels of knowledge and skills in stoma care.

Method

A questionnaire was sent to all the nurses who had completed the course and attended the workshop.

Summary

Offering this course in our hospitals has been a worthwhile enterprise and we would encourage other nurse specialists to offer this opportunity to ward nurses. Our initial findings showed that even very experienced registered nurses gained knowledge and skills from the course. The non registered nurses found the course very useful for their practice. The results highlighted other areas for improvement, such as problem solving approaches and facilitating smaller groups on the practical workshop day.