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ABSTRACT
The rapidly escalating patient acuity level in today's acute care hospitals demands greater specialization and more advanced clinical nursing skills. Professional nursing journals are an excellent source of continuing education and practical clinical update. We designed a descriptive study to determine registered nurses' use of current nursing periodicals. A 26-item questionnaire was used. Respondents were 507 full-time RNs employed in two metropolitan hospitals. Ninety-three percent of the RNs felt that information in journals helps them in their practice, and 68% subscribed to professional nursing journals. Eighty-eight percent agreed they needed to read journals in order to keep up. Articles of clinical interest were the most widely read sections, and the most frequent reason given for not reading was lack of time.
Continuing education is essential for todays professional nurse to keep up with scientific and technological advances in nursing care. The patient acuity level in the acute care hospital of the 1980s is constantly escalating and demands increasingly complex clinical skills and greater specialization in nursing practice.
The American Nurses Association (ANA) Code for Nurses (1976) is the accepted guide for professional conduct and relationships in carrying out nursing responsibilities. The code states "the nurse maintains competence in nursing" and directs the nurse to actively seek appropriate learning resources and to engage in self-directed learning. Although hospitals generally provide both mandatory and voluntary inservice education and continuing education for their nurse employees, professional nurses are expected to seek other educational experiences to meet the individual needs of their specialties.
Nurses have always been admonished to read the latest literature in order to be the best nurse they can be for their patients. Over half a century ago, Ann Doyle (1933), in an American Journal of Nursing article entitled "Reading Maketh a Full Nurse," encouraged nurses to acquire good reading habits and to value reading as the best way to stay informed about changes in nursing techniques. For Doyle and her contemporaries in 1933, there were very few periodicals. Nurses depended on books for their professional education, and the books were medical texts; there were no nursing textbooks. At that time few schools of nursing could boast of having a library.
Before 1950, only five major national nursing journals existed in the United States....