Karya Journal of Health Science, vol.3, no.3, pp.284-289, 2022 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
Objective: Innovation is of great importance in improving the quality of care. Nurses must apply creative techniques and improve existing procedures to create greater care opportunities. Additionally, nurses that have unique ideas should be encouraged to pursue them, and those that are successful should be recognized and rewarded. Because revealing the innovative role of nurses in health care is of great importance in terms of improving both public health and professional knowledge. In line with these importance and suggestions, it was aimed to evaluate the individual innovativeness levels of nurses in this study. Method: The cross-sectional study was conducted with 427 nurses working at the Health Practice and Research Center of a university, who continued to work between the application dates (April-May 2019) and agreed to participate in the research. Ethics Committee (Decision No: 2019-04/52), institutional permission and written and verbal consent from the nurses were obtained for the research. The data of the research were collected by using the "Personal Information Form" and the "Individual Innovation Scale". The data obtained from the study were evaluated by applying the relevant statistical tests in the SPSS 22.00 program. Results: In this study, the mean score of the individual innovative scale was found to be 65.19 (8.16). When the individual innovative levels of nurses were evaluated according to this average, it was determined that 34.9% were skeptical, 34.4% questioning, 17.3% traditional, 12.2% pioneering and 1.2% innovative. It was determined that the nurses' being 41 and over, working in the profession for more than 21 years, being a member of a professional association and living in the city center affected their individual innovativeness scores statistically. Conclusion: The results of the research revealed that being a high school and associate degree graduate, working as a clinical nurse and not needing to follow professional knowledge are risk factors for individual innovativeness. According to these results, it is seen that the innovativeness level of nurses is low. The results of the research revealed the need to increase the individual innovativeness level of nurses.