Two years of German summer school of nursing informatics: Did we reach the goals?

This paper describes a continuous effort to improve the knowledge of nursing informatics among German nurses. The authors have co-operated in the nursing informatics working group of the German Medical Informatics Association GMDS. Besides, one of the authors has been active in the European summer school of nursing informatics (Essoni) for several years. The authors have now established a national counterpart to the Essoni program, the German summer school of nursing informatics. This event in German language is centred around nursing informatics topics. Students may opt for one of the several study tracks to gain insight in topics such as nursing classifications and nursing terminologies, clinical information systems and their implementation or teaching requirements in nursing informatics. They go through a 5-day curriculum consisting of plenary sessions, lectures and opportunities for self learning and self teaching. At the end they demonstrate to the fellow students from the other tracks what they have achieved in their own field of study. The German Summer School is open to interested nurses, nurse executives and nurse teachers. In this paper, we will describe the curriculum, talk about the participants and show results of the questionnaire-based evaluation for the first two events in 1998 and 1999.