The purpose of the study was to do a task analysis.of PHC nurse practice by identifying the skills required by nurses working at the primary health care clinic in order to plan staff development programmes. The objectives were: to compile ; an extensive list of possible tasks; engage Primary Health Care Nurses in identifying the frequency of tasks executed; and engage Primary Health Care Nurses in determining how important are the tasks in their practice. This was a descriptive survey. A mail survey was used to collect data. Two stratified random samples of nurses were drawn from the sample frame of Uthukela Health District. The sample consisted of 84 Primary Health Care Nurses; 59 registered nurses, 17 enrolled nurses, and 8 enrolled nursing auxiliaries. The questionnaire was developed based on PHC core package, other literature and services provided at PHC clinics. It had three sections; section one and dealt with demographic data, section two consisted of the list of activities that describe the nursing practice and the respondents had to indicate the frequency of performing the activity and importance of the activity and section three dealt with the activities that the respondent perform but were not included in the list provided. The response from mailed questionnaires was 72%. The results show that . I eleven items were rated very frequent by 70% of the nurses, forty-four items rated frequent by more than 50% of the nurses. Twenty-seven tasks were rated as important by 50% or more of the nurses. In frequency and importance, nineteen items score above 1 standard deviation on this index. In the clinical tasks, promotive and preventive service predominated. A high percentage of these tasks were done very frequently and were seen as important.

Thesis (M.Cur.-Nursing)- University of Natal, Durban, 2002.