Abstract: Nurses at a New Zealand Metropolitan Hospital were surveyed to determine whether the following factors affected their desire to participate in continuing education. Age, Family responsibilities, reading of Journals/Health literature related to Nursing, attendance of in service/staff development programs, careers aims and intended number of years to remain in Nursing. 30 Nurses were requested to participate in the research project. They were either registered General and Obstetric Nurses or Registered Comprehensive Nurses and 15 worked full time while 15 worked part time. Null hypotheses were formulated and tested because it is recognised that Nurses have a professional responsibility to maintain their knowledge and expertise and to do this in a Health Care system and society that is continually changing there must be a commitment to life long continuing education. Therefore , I thought it would be of interest to determine whether certain factors influenced Nurses' desire to participate in continuing education. With the factors of Age, Family responsibilities, hours of work, number of years registered reading of Journals/Health literature related to Nursing, and intended number of years to remain in Nursing there was no significant difference (p> 0.10) in the desire to participate in continuing education, as was Nurses basic qualification (p< 0.05) With the factor of attendance of in service/ Staff development programs there doesn't appear to be any significant difference and with career plans the sample expected frequencies were too small for statistical analysis