Role Development of Nursing Officers in ROKAF Base

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Though nursing officer system was introduced to ROKAF with the changes in ROKAF's medical environment and expectations toward nursing profession, its role is not clearly defined yet and this leads to the necessity of further research on systematic role development. This work, therefore, tried to supply basic information for its role development by finding out role expectations on nursing officer in ROKAF Base from air force members. METHODS: Surveys were conducted from Oct. 10 to Oct. 25, 2002 on three groups in ROKAF air bases nursing officers, medical team and consumers of nursing services. For data collection, survey instrument was developed through research surveys and delphi method. Data were analyzed with SPSS Win 10.1. RESULTS: Results of the study is summarized as follows; 1) Surveys were conducted on 169 persons consumers 109 (64.9%), medical team 32 (18.9%), and nursing officers 28 (16.6%). 2) The type of that nursing officers assumed were conducting are clinician, educator, researcher, consultant, administrator and military officer. 3)The degrees of role expectation on above roles were highest in nursing officers, followed by medical team and consumers. In detail, for the nursing officers group, the order was clinician (3.68+/-21), researcher (3.62+/-35), educator (3.59+/-27), consultant (3.42+/-43), administrator (3.42+/-39) and military officer (3.30+/-34). For the medical team group, the order was researcher (3.49+/-41), educator (3.48+/-49), clinician (3.38+/-37), military officer (3.23+/-45) and consultant (3.17+/-56). For the consumers group, the order of role expectation is researcher(3.18+/-48), clinician (3.14+/-39), consultant (3.12+/-53), military officer (3.10+/-48), educator (3.09+/-49) and administrator (2.93+/-44). All of the roles were defined as necessary by the three surveyed groups except the consumer group for the role of administrator. There were significant differences in the role expectation, between medical team group and nursing officers group, for the role as a whole (t=-2.46, P=.017) and for the role as clinician specifically (t=-3.79, P=.000). DISCUSSION: Based on the research results, I propose that clinician, educator, researcher, consultant, administrator and military officer the role of assumed by nursing officers in air base should be defined. Since role establishment and proper execution requires more comprehensive research to cope with excluded roles and on related matters such as personnel, organizational system, institution and regulation, inter-disciplinary studies are necessary.