[Nursing in the Canary Islands and the academic and professional changes]

To find out the wishes of nurses in the Canary Islands in light of the new academic and professional changes, and to identify whether the sociodemographic variables can influence their decisions.

We chose a cross-sectional descriptive study using a questionnaire with 5 questions over a period of three months in 2008.

A total of 1070 nurses responded to the questionnaire. Of these, 91.9% (n=984) wanted to do their degree in nursing, either voluntarily or obliged to by the academic changes, 71.5% (n=765) wanted to do an official Masters degree, compared to 47.7% (n=510) who wanted to or are doing a PhD. As for career changes, 48.8% (n=522) of the sample wabted access through the Nursing Internal Residency EIR program, and 34.8% (n=372) by the "exceptional route".

All sociodemographic variables appeared to influence nurses in continuing their education, particularly showing that, marital status, children, type of contract and Canary Islands residency influence both the academic route as well as work.