Nursing Career Ladder System: Effect on Professional Development Among Staff Nurses

Background: Nursing career ladders are effective processes that allow nurses understand how to advance by providing them with goals and action plans that improve professional nursing practice.By doing this, nurses have a validated path goals to success and be recognized nursing leaders.It also affects quality and productivity of clinical nursing practice, incentives, rewards and promotion systems.Aim of the study: Assessing nursing career ladder system program effect on professional development among staff nurses.Design: A quasi-experimental research design with one group pretest and posttest.Subjects:The subjects of the study included 172 out from 310 staff nurses working at Ain Shams University hospital.Setting: The study was performed at Ain Shams Hospital which is affiliated to Ain Shams University hospitals.Tools of data collection: Three tools used for data collection namely: Knowledge Questionnaire, Career Ladder System Scale, and Professional Development Short scale (PDSS).Results: After implementing the program, there was a highly statistically significant improvement in career ladder knowledge, perception levels (p=0.001) and professional development levels among staff nurses.The study also identified a highly statistically significant relationship between nurses' knowledge and career ladder perception (p=0.001) and professional development (p=0.03) after program implementation.Furthermore, career ladder system program had a positive effect on professional development among staff nurses.Conclusion: the result revealed that nursing career ladder system program had a positive effect on professional development among staff nurses.Recommendations: Conducting comparative studies between governmental and non-governmental hospitals about career ladder system implementation and outcomes to increase the overall perception about it.