The purpose of this study is to review the important variables affecting nursing teachers' professional traits and thereby, explore the comprehensive and fundamental ways to improve their traits. Today, childcare become a social issue due to increasin...
The purpose of this study is to review the important variables affecting nursing teachers' professional traits and thereby, explore the comprehensive and fundamental ways to improve their traits. Today, childcare become a social issue due to increasing working mothers, disintegrations of families and nuclear families.
In 1991, the government had 'Younger Children Nursing Code' enacted, and thereby, the concept of a simple childcare began to be replaced with the nursing services covering education only to enhance the nursing services in both terms of quantity and quality. However, what is more important is nursing teachers' quality affecting the children directly.
Nursing teachers influence children's learning, development, emotion and growth, and therefore, play an important role as nursing program operators in enhancing the quality of nursing services. Creation of an adequate environment and operation of an excellent nursing program for children depend on nursing teachers' capacity or professionalism. In other words, nursing teachers' professionalism has an important effect on children's sound growth and development of personality.
For this study, 192 nursing teachers working for the nursing facilities located in Kyonggi-do were sampled.
First of all, their working environment was surveyed extensively, and then, their academic backgrounds, majors, certifications, working conditions and training, and their perceptions and uses of the nursing information center were surveyed. Next, nursing teachers' perceptions of their roles, working conditions, occupational change, training and the services of the nursing information center were comparatively reviewed as per type of nursing facility.
The results of this study can be summarized as follows;
It was found that the ratio of nursing teachers to children was not much different from the criteria specified by the 'Younger Children Nursing Code'. Namely, the ratio of nursing teachers to children was found adequate. However, nursing teachers' wage level, working conditions and services of the nursing information center were negatively perceived by the nursing teachers. First, there was a wide gap between nursing teachers' wage level and their expected one, which suggests that if they should be rewarded a little more, their moral would be enhanced to improve the quality of their nursing services. Next, in terms of their working conditions, most of the nursing teachers were allowed to leave paid for delivery of their children, but there was found much room for improvement of their paid leave in terms of length of leave depending on their working career and use of the hospitals. On the other hand, most of the nursing teachers were less aware of the nursing information center, much less using it. In this regard, nursing teachers should be encouraged to use the center for information regarding their job, various nursing programs, counselling services, data search, job opportunities and guidance services. Then, their professionalism would be enhanced much.
Summing up,
1. It is necessary to establish a more professional and systematic certification system for nursing teachers in order to improve their quality.
2. It is essential to expand the current one-year-long curriculum in order to bring up more professional nursing teachers.
3. In order to improve nursing teachers' quality, it is deemed necessary to awaken them of their 'roles', while improving their working conditions.
4. In order to help nursing teachers use the nursing information center more effectively, it is necessary to enhance the role of the center, so that it can provide nursing teachers with information more effectively and thereby, a more systematic and efficient nursing service system be established.