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Measuring perceptions of the clinical career pathway in a New Zealand hospital.

Clinical Career Pathways (CCPs) for nurses were introduced in the 1970s and they were first established in New Zealand during the late 1980s. The implementation of CCP programmes has met with mixed response; many nurses view it negatively as an extra and unnecessary demand from their employers while others perceive it to be a valuable form of professional development. This paper introduces a new instrument, the Clinical Career Pathway Evaluation Tool (CCPET) designed to assess nurses' and midwives' knowledge of and attitudes towards their Clinical Career Pathway. The 51 item instrument takes the form of a self-report questionnaire in two sections. The first tests knowledge of the CCP, as implemented at the study hospital, the second measures attitudes towards CCP and professional development. In this paper we describe the development of the CCPET and present some of the results from an initial application of the instrument with 239 nurses and midwives in a New Zealand hospital. Results indicate that knowledge levels were moderate in this sample and were correlated with both positive and negative attitudes. Results of t-test comparisons indicated that, on average, the group who had already completed a CCP portfolio had greater knowledge and more positive attitudes than the group who had not. The authors suggest firstly that the CCPET is useful for measuring CCP knowledge and attitudes in a constantly restructuring nursing environment, and secondly that the instrument can be easily adapted for use in other hospitals and organisations.