A process for determining content for a nurse internship program

The purpose of this study was to determine the essential content of a surgical nurse internship program. Five groups of senior nursing students, nursing faculty, and nursing service staff ranked and weighted 68 topics separated into five categories: professional, personal, patient/family, broad clinical, and surgical nursing. Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance was used to determine the agreement within each of the nurse groups, between each two nurse groups, and among all nurses. All nurses showed a significantly high agreement in ranking topics of all five categories. The associate degree faculty was the only nurse group to have a significant agreement within the group. Of the five nurse groups, the nursing service staff had the most significant rankings with other nurse groups. Because the topics ranked are broad in context, the study is applicable to nurse internship programs of other areas and to continuing education (CE) and staff development (SD) programs for newly graduated nurses.