Abstract

Background information Public health nurses in Japan are professionals with a national licence who serve as members of local governments and offer services to local inhabitants. To provide top-notch public health services, public health nurses must quickly forge their professional identities. Nonetheless, it is unclear how their professional identity is structured. Our goals were to explore the professional identity structures of public health nurses employed by governmental organisations and to define the traits that make up their identities.

Methods: 670 PHNs employed by regional governmental organisations participated in questionnaire surveys. Measurement indices for PHNs' professional identities, fundamental characteristics, and scores that reflect components of self-respect were all included in the investigation's items. We performed an exploratory factor analysis after examining the examined items. We also gave the factors a name and looked into their suitability and reliability. Associations with the characteristics or components of self-respect were also examined.

Results: 309 effective responses (effective answer ratio: 88.2%) from 350 respondents (52.2%) were examined. Twelve components were found by item and factor analyses, and these factors—"intention to advance professionally," "confidence in one's own talents," and "occupational affinity"—were divided into three groups. A positive association was found between self-respect scales and the professional identity measure. All 12 things together have a coefficient of 0.89. Age, number of PHNs in the workplace, and years of experience as PHNs were found to significantly differ from the other variables.

Conclusion: Three components were discovered to make up the professional identity of PHNs.