A report on the Council on Certification 1996 Professional Practice Analysis.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the Council on Certification of Nurse Anesthetists 1996 Professional Practice Analysis. This analysis was used to update the previous content validation studies. Surveys were mailed to a select group and a practitioner group of 2,859 Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists with a response rate of 63.7%. Respondents were asked survey questions related to demographics, practice settings, education, and fundamental knowledge related to nurse anesthesia practice. Respondents were asked for the frequency and level of expertise related to patient conditions, procedures, anesthesia agents and techniques, equipment, instrumentation, and technology of anesthesia practice. The results for both groups were consistent with the previous studies. The Rasch rating scale model was used to transform the results from ordinal data onto a linear, equal-interval scale. Members of the Council on Certification of Nurse Anesthetists carefully reviewed all of the Professional Practice Analysis results and voted to maintain the current test blueprint and percentage of test items in each area.