Competency Development in New Registered Nurse Graduates: Closing the Gap Between Education and Practice

Abstract

The gap between a new registered nurse graduate's education for practice and actual practice requirements of new registered nurses has long been an accepted fact in nursing. This article describes the development of an intervention from the academic side of the gap to improve the competency of nursing students before graduation. The intervention is noteworthy because it was developed collaboratively between academia and practice. The three-pronged intervention included development of learning modules based on the top 10 high-risk, high-volume patient conditions; faculty and staff educator development in learning strategies to enhance competency development; and sharing of products with the 84 schools of nursing in Texas.

Developing and validating the Clinical Competence Questionnaire: A self-assessment instrument for upcoming baccalaureate nursing graduates

“…and (d) how should competence be defined [1,7,8] ? Clinical administrators and academic faculties have evaluated the quantitative and qualitative attributes of nurse competence [3,5,[8][9][10] . However, most of the studies evaluated the competence of all nurses without differentiating between the nurses' varying years of working experiences.…”

“…Researchers report that new nurses not only lack adequate competence for working in a clinical environment, but are also perceived by nurse managers to lack in competent clinical skills [1][2][3] . In a survey conducted with 57,000 nurse leaders, only 25% were fully satisfied with the performance of new nursing graduates at the time of their initial employment [4] .…”

Pregraduation clinical training program improves clinical competence of nurse students in Taiwan: An interventional study

“…For example, in a study that surveyed 57,000 nurse leaders, only 25% of the leaders were fully satisfied with new graduates' performance [13] . Other researchers have reported that a profound gap in clinical performance expectations exists between new graduates and healthcare staff in clinical settings [29,30] . Based on the results of our study, the implementation of the pregraduation clinical training program might shorten the gap between students' competence and preceptors' expectations on students' performance.…”

Exploration of the Gap between Theory and Practice in Tunisia Nurse Education System: A Cross-Sectional Descriptive Study with a Focus on Hand Hygiene

“…Thus, the transition from student to registered nurse has been described as the most stressful period and this is especially due to the gap between the theory taught and the place of clinical practice. (Burns & Poster, 2008;Estrada et al, 2015) Having chosen to tackle this multidimensional issue our greatest challenge as researchers was to focus the study center of interest because due to the immense quantity of theory instructed in the nursing faculty curriculum it was simply impossible for us to included them all .And so, after being greatly influenced by the WHO initiative -the Global Patient Safety Challenge: Clean Care is Safer Care -(WHO, 2009), which considered hand hygiene an elementary right because ''clean hands help prevent patient suffering and save lives''. Thus we have chosen the hand hygiene technique as a representative element of the theoretical knowledge taught in nursing faculties given its primordial place in the promotion of health.…”

“…In nowadays, new graduates nurses are increasingly deployed into clinical areas requiring competency, professional responsibilities and accountabilities that is potentially beyond their capacity (Burns & Poster, 2008;Estrada et al, 2015;Li & Kenward, 2006). It has been recorded that in some countries up to 10% of their current nursing workforce in different care settings are new nurse graduates (Berkow, Virkstis, Stewart, & Conway, 2009) Evidence suggests that despite having cleared the legal and professional requirements to enter nursing practice , the newly licensed nurses display an alarming lack of clinical and problem-solving skills (Shin, Jung, Kim, Lee, & Eom, 2010)and judgement (Li & Kenward, 2006) along with lacking the ability to handle multiple patients (Casey et al, 2011), thus they are unable to provide safe and competent nursing care.…”