Clinical Nurses' Continuing Education Needs in Acute Burn Care

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this research was to explore clinical nurses' continuing education needs in caring for patients with acute burns.

METHOD

A descriptive research design was applied. To explore clinical nurses' continuing education needs in caring for patients with acute burns, focus group interviews were conducted. Educational needs assessments in acute burn care knowledge and skills were developed based on a content analysis of the focus group interviews. The participants were clinical nurses at a burn treatment hospital. Collected data were analyzed.

RESULTS

The nurses showed a high educational need for nursing knowledge and skills in caring for patients with acute burns. They indicated a need for educational content covering comprehensive nursing knowledge and skills for this care, including emergency treatment and psychosocial nursing care for the physical changes induced by acute burns.

CONCLUSION

A systematic continuing education program needs to be developed for nurses who care for patients with acute burns and delivered using blended learning approaches. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2022;53(2):77-82.].

Interpersonal skills mediate the relationship between communicative and clinical competencies among nursing students: A descriptive study

BACKGROUND

The development of clinical competency reduces nursing students' stress and turnover intention and improves their clinical practice satisfaction and academic performance. Still, many nursing supervisors feel that new graduate nurses have inadequate communicative and clinical competencies, and no prior study has analyzed the mediating effect of interpersonal skills in the relationship between these two variables.

OBJECTIVES

To examine the factors that affect nursing students' clinical competency, including the mediating effect of interpersonal skills, and to identify/determine interventions that promote it and improve students' clinical performance.

DESIGN

This study employed a cross-sectional, descriptive correlational design.

SETTING

Four departments of nursing in Jeollabuk-do, South Korea.

PARTICIPANTS

Participants (N = 222; mean age = 22.7 years; 75.2% women) were students enrolled in the third and fourth year of nursing.

METHODS

From February 5-28, 2018, we collected data through self-reported questionnaires; these asked about participants' demographic characteristics and measured their communicative competency, interpersonal skills, and clinical competency. The relationships among the variables were identified using Pearson's correlation coefficient. We also used the Sobel test and a three-step multiple regression analysis to verify the mediating effects of interpersonal skills.

RESULTS

Students who were female, in their fourth year, satisfied with their major, and satisfied with their clinical practice had higher clinical competency scores than their counterparts. Interpersonal skills completely mediated the effects of communicative competency on clinical competency (explanatory power = 53.8%).

CONCLUSIONS

The results suggest the need for a program that improves nursing students' social relationship skills and diminishes their anxiety. In particular, students in the third and fourth years need a continuous/intensified curriculum that fosters their communicative competencies, such as listening to patients' needs and establishing effective interpersonal relationships with peers/superiors. Longitudinal studies are warranted to identify differences in communicative/clinical competencies among nursing students in different academic years.

Core nursing competency assessment tool for graduates of outcome-based nursing education in South Korea: A validation study

AIM

To develop a competency assessment instrument for nurses who have completed an outcome-based educational program based on national standards and to assess the content-, construct-, and criterion-related validity of that instrument.

METHODS

In the development stage, the competencies of nurses with 1-3 years' clinical experience after the completion of nursing education and training programs, based on national standards, were identified. A systematic literature review was conducted to derive the competencies in addition to the 12 national standard competencies. In the evaluation stage, the content-, construct-, and criterion-related validity of the developed tool were verified. For verification of the content validity at each stage, the participants were 10 nurse managers of general hospitals and 10 nurse professors. A factor analysis was conducted to assess the construct validity and the Cronbach's alpha coefficients and item-total correlation were used to assess the reliability of the developed scale. For the factor analysis, the participants were 141 nurses with 1-3 years' clinical experience who were recruited from four general hospitals. In order to evaluate the construct- and criterion-related validity, the correlations between a nursing performance measurement scale, a self-leadership tool, and the developed scale were examined.

RESULTS

A competency assessment instrument, consisting of 19 items on a 4-point scale, was developed and validated for assessing the competencies among nurses with 1-3 years' experience.

CONCLUSIONS

Nursing research, policy awareness, and leadership competencies were required by the Korean Accreditation Board of Nursing Education for nursing college graduates, but were removed due to poor content validity, indicating a need for nursing professionals to bridge the gap between educational standards in nursing colleges and clinical settings.