Promoting occupational health nursing training: an educational outreach with a blended model of distance and traditional learning approaches.

In 2009, occupational health nursing faculty and professionals at the University of Washington developed an innovative continuing nursing education offering, the OHN Institute. The OHN Institute was designed to meet the following objectives: (1) extend basic occupational health nursing training to non-occupational health nurses in Federal Region X, (2) target new occupational health nurses or those who possessed little or no advanced education in occupational health nursing, and (3) offer a hybrid continuing nursing education program consisting of on-site and distance learning modalities. Evaluation findings suggested that the various continuing nursing education modalities and formats (e.