Background: Nursing students need to build their self-confidence to cope with complex clinical situations, and practicing nurses must maintain and boost their self-confidence to provide safe, accurate, and high-quality patient care. Exposing nursing students and staff nurses to high-fidelity simulation to can their self-confidence, thus advancing their competencies. Methods: This study employed a quasi-experimental research design to identify and compare the acquired critical thinking skills, satisfaction, and self-confidence of nursing students and staff nurses based on their use of high-fidelity simulation (HFS) learning. Results:The mean difference between the pre-and post-tests of nursing students and staff nurses in HFS sessions 1 and 2 was significant, with p < .0001. Both groups of participants expressed high levels of satisfaction and self-confidence in the HFS experience. Furthermore, participants' satisfaction with the current learning system had a p -value of .6628 and their self-confidence in learning had a p -value of .9578, which indicates no significant difference. Conclusion: Both groups of participants conveyed high levels of satisfaction and self-confidence following the HFS experience. Furthermore, the use of HFS enhanced their critical thinking skills and boosted their learning retention.

Background: Competence, while firmly established as a primary conceptual framework in nursing education, continues to lack clarity and uniformity across borders and contexts. While a wealth of research has been carried out on the various dimensions of this concept, including the drafting and implementation of frameworks for nursing competence, no unifying international framework has been forthcoming. Indeed, the continued development of more localized approaches, based on geography or specialization, would appear to be the most realistic objective. It is incumbent on nurse educationalists and researchers to build on existing frameworks and develop evidence-based tested methodologies for competence assessment in localized contexts. Currently, there is a dearth of such evidence-based frameworks in the Middle East and in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in particular. This study aimed to formulate and validate a competence framework for undergraduate nursing students in KSA. Results: Following documentary analysis, framework drafting and a three round Delphi process, a consensus was reached as to elements, comprising six discrete domains, to be included. The identified competence domains provide a framework to guide the implementation of a competence-based assessment and move towards a competency-based curriculum for nursing education in KSA. Conclusions: The study concluded that providing a competency-based model and expanding and standardization of competency concept in different dimensions of nursing profession is a necessity; considering that clarification of the concept of competency, the recognition of its dimensions, characteristics and the factors affecting it help in determining the criteria and standardizing the competency tools.