ASSESSMENT OF CLINICAL COMPETENCE OF REGISTERED NURSES AND LEARNING OUTCOMES FOR CURRICULUM DESIGN : THE MALAYSIA EXPERIENCE

Introduction

The aim of nursing education program is to produce safe and competence nurse practitioners for health care organization. It becomes the responsibility and accountability of nursing education institution as higher education provider to design the curiculum and identification of learning outcomes and domains that will prepare the novice nursing students to the level of advanced beginner at the point of entry into the profession or the job market.

Objectives :

The purpose of the study was to investigate, identify and validate the core competencies that are required for the curriculum design for pre-registration nursing program in the teaching hospitals under the Ministry of Higher Learning of Malaysia.

Methods :

A three round Modified Delphi Technique was used to identify the important and required competencies of registered nurses in public teaching hospitals. Nineteen subject Matter Experts (SMEs) were identified. The approach uses the consensus method to determine the extent of an agreement over the identified competencies. The responses were coded and analysed. A three round Modified Delphi took almost a year to complete and the process has enabled the researcher to develop the questionnaire and established the content validity of the instrument. As a result more new competencies and related tasks were identified and added in the questionnaire. The Nursing Competencies Questionnaires were later developed and administered to 620 of RNs in Medical- Surgical wards of three teaching hospitals in the country.

Findings & Conclusion :

The RNs (497) rated the task performance, task importance and self ability on the identified seven domain of competencies.The findings highlighted more than 90% of RNs performed the identified competencies, majority felt the competencies items were of highly importance. The findings showed that majority of respondents assessed themselves of having acceptable level of proficiency in performing the task. The identified competencies will be proposed to be the framework of curriculum design and learning outcomes for pre-registration nursing program in Malaysia.