The topic of this thesis is important because it supplies necessary information on the expertise of anesthetic nurses as assessed by them. The work can be used to plan and implement the necessary unit-specific training and to introduce new and returning nurses to anesthesia care. When introducing new employees, it is important that the employee's skills match the general competency requirements of a hospital district.

The purpose of this thesis was to find out nurses' evaluation of their professional skills of anesthetic nursing in the hospital district. The main goal of this thesis was to acquire information for the planning of anesthetic nurses training in their workplaces and put it into practice. Likewise, to acquaint nurses to the new work environment and to evaluate demanding of the work assignments. Also, the results can be utilized in the planning of perioperative studies and implementation at Oulu University of Applied Sciences.

This is a quantitative cross-sectional study, and it was implemented and analyzed as Webropol survey. The survey is based on the doctoral thesis of Erja Tengvall (2010) titled “Professional competence of perioperative and anesthetist nurse: a questionnaire research to perioperative and anesthetist nurses, anesthesiologists and surgeons. The research position of this thesis was to estimate answers which were gotten through Webropol. After that anesthetic nurses' professional competencies were compared to the common knowledge-based ambitions of anesthetic nurses. The data collecting took 4 weeks and total sampling was used as the sampling method. The population was N=250 and the sample were n=81 anesthetic nurses and the response rate was 33 %. Webropol analytics and Webropol professional statics were used to analyze data.

It was found out that professional competencies are most dependent on age, work experience, and work unit. The skills of the under 28 years old vary the most and the skills of the 48-57 years are at the best level. The best competencies were in a central surgery unit, an outpatient care center and a surgery unit of a head and an area of the neck. All age groups estimate poor control of special functions such as cardiac output, pulmonary artery wedge pressure and ventricular pacing threshold measurements. Besides, only about one-third of anesthetic nurses rated their resuscitation skills to be commendable. They would have room for improvement in giving feedback to members of the surgery team. It can be concluded that their self-assessment of own skills corresponds to the common knowledge-based ambitions.