A report on the Council on Certification of Nurse Anesthetists 2001 Professional Practice Analysis.

The purpose of this article is to report the results of the 2001 Professional Practice Analysis performed by the Council on Certification of Nurse Anesthetists. This analysis was used to validate the content and test specifications for the National Certification Examination. A total of 2,545 surveys were mailed to 2 groups of Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists and 1,197 surveys were returned, a response rate of 47%. The first section of the survey gathered relevant demographic, educational, and experiential background. The second section gathered data concerning the frequency in which they encountered, and the level of expertise required to manage, patient conditions and surgical procedures. The results from this survey were consistent with previous surveys. The Rasch rating scale model was used to transform the results from ordinal data into a linear measure of the item frequency and importance. Members of the Council on Certification of Nurse Anesthetists carefully reviewed all the survey results and voted to maintain the current test specifications and percentages.