Assessing Nursing Competencies: 5 Tips for Facilities

Nursing competencies can serve as helpful benchmarks for improving care delivery. In pre-licensure programs, students must meet a set of core competencies to earn their degrees. This validates that a student has acquired all the basic skills and knowledge needed to practice as a nurse. Once nurses are licensed and working, it’s important for facilities to continue building off these core competencies as a way to enhance care quality.

Since there’s no standard way to measure competencies in nursing professionals, facilities must take initiative in creating their own methods of evaluation. We’ll explain the importance of assessing nurse competencies and outline five key tips on how to do this in the workplace.

What Are Nursing Competencies?

Nurse competencies refer to the skills, knowledge, and behaviors that nurses must integrate into practice to perform at the highest level possible. Because of this, it’s possible for facilities to establish and monitor a set of competencies to support professional development in their staff.

But, what exactly does a nurse need to be deemed “competent?” In reality, this largely depends on the type of specialty and facility that nurses are working in. To give you a general idea of some basic nurse competencies, examples include:

• Interpersonal skills: Nurses must be perceptive of individualized needs and understand how to build trust with patients and colleagues.

• Teamwork: Nurses must be able to function well on a team and collaborate with other healthcare professionals.

• Clinical care delivery: Nurses must continuously expand their skills and knowledge, and understand how to apply them in practice.

Beyond these basic competencies, nurses frequently acquire new or advanced skills as their careers progress. It’s important for facilities to find ways to evaluate competency levelsin accordance with each nurse’s individual goals and progress.

Why Is It Important to Assess Competencies?

Assessing nurse competencies is one way for facilities to stay informed about their staff’s professional growth. By creating evaluation metrics for areas of nursing care, facility leaders can:

• Determine the skill level of their teams and identify specific areas that can be improved.
• Share actionable feedback to staff who want to develop their skills and knowledge.
• Provide resources that are needed to help staff with professional development.

How to Assess Nurse Competencies: 5 Tips

Now that we’ve gone over what nurse competencies are and why they’re important, you may be wondering how to evaluate them in your staff. Here are five tips that will help you better assess and encourage skill development among your nursing team.

1. Establish Competency Standards

First, it’s important to figure out what exactly you’re trying to evaluate. Establish clear standards by defining the types of competencies that you want your nurses to meet. Consider creating a nursing competencies checklist that can be easily accessed by your staff. This provides a foundation for evaluations and also makes your nurses aware of your expectations.

Remember, there’s no one-size-fits all way to measure the competencies of nursing professionals. Because of this, it’s important to consider what types of skills are most valuable for your facility. For example, if you’re running a nursing home, geriatric knowledge may be a core competency that you expect your staff to continuously expand on. Alternatively, adaptability to new practice environments may be more a sensible competency for nurses working in float pools.

2. Evaluate Competencies in Practical Ways

Once you’ve established your facility’s competency standards, implement ways to evaluate or observe them in practice. To get a better idea of what this might entail, let’s consider the example of clinical competence in nursing.

If your facility is assessing how well new nurses are applying their clinical knowledge, it’s not very practical or time efficient to give them a written exam. Instead, you might consider having preceptors fill out evaluation ratings or report back on the nurses they’re orienting.

3. Establish Competencies Based on a Nurse’s Level of Practice

While there are basic core competencies for nursing students, these don’t translate well in practice since there are several different levels of nursing. For instance, a licensed practical nurse (LPN) shouldn’t be expected to hold the same competencies as a registered nurse (RN).

Thus, it’s important to establish different competency standards for each level of nursing that you manage. Additionally, keep in mind that new nurses will take longer to develop certain skills compared to senior nurses. While it’s good to set standardized competencies for each level of nursing, you shouldn’t expect the same rate of progress between nurses with varying years of experience.

4. Provide Continuous Feedback to Your Nurses

Beyond establishing and measuring nursing competencies, it’s important to provide regular feedback to your staff so that they know what to improve. This is most often done during an annual evaluation, which allows you to track the performance of your nurses from year to year, but it’s also important to have regular check-ins throughout the year.

To strengthen your feedback, you can refer your staff to facility resources or professional development activities that could benefit their growth. This allows you to assess whether your staff have taken steps to improve since the last time you checked in with them.

5. Review and Update Competencies as Needed

Nursing is a field that changes constantly. There may be emerging evidence-based standards or protocols that your current competencies don’t cover. If this is the case, don’t be afraid to reevaluate and update your competencies as necessary.

Similarly, if some of your evaluation methods aren’t giving you helpful insight, it may be time to try other methods. Every facility is different, so it may just take some time to figure out what method works best for your workflow — whether it’s through team-based surveys or verbal report-backs.

Discover More Ways to Support the Growth of Your Staff

Looking for practical ways to help your staff develop new nursing competencies? IntelyCare is here to help. Our team of healthcare experts provides free management tips and guides for nursing leaders.