Examining the Effectiveness of a Distant Learning Education Program: Use of Patient Safety and Reporting Law and Ethics as Example

This study was to test a distant learning education program aiming to improve nurses’ understanding of law and ethics regarding to patient safety and reporting in Taiwan. With stratified randomized sampling of 3 medical centers, 12 regional and 50 local hospitals, 2,323 questionnaires were distributed to nurses working at the sampled hospitals. Questionnaire return rate was 99.5% with 2,312 valid returned. Based on this survey, the researchers designed a distant learning education course targeting the knowledge deficits. The results indicated that 57.7% of the sampled nurses passed the patient safety and reporting law and ethic test before the education program was instituted by the National Union of Nurses Associations. 38,603 nurses completed the distant learning course and 94.8% passed the test. This study demonstrated that the distant learning education program is effective, and should be considered as a way to improve access to and reduce cost of continuing education.

Authors and Affiliations

1. School of Nursing, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan

   Chiou-Fen Lin & Meei-Ling Shyu

2. The National Union of Nurses’ Associations ROC, Taiwan

   Meei-Shiow Lu

3. School of Health Care Administration, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan

   Chung-I Huang

4. Department of Technology Application and Human Resource Development, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

   Chung-I Huang

Editors and Affiliations

1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SeoulTech, 172 Gongreung 2-dong, Nowon-gu, 139-743, Seoul, Korea

   James J. Park

2. School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney, Building J12, 2006, Sydney, NSW, Australia

   Albert Zomaya

3. Division of Computer Engineering, Mokwon University, 88 Do-An-Buk-Ro, Seo-gu, 302-729, Daejeon, Korea

   Sang-Soo Yeo

4. Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida, CSE 301, 32611, Gainesville, FL, USA

   Sartaj Sahni

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