Designing and Validating Performance Standards for Clinical Instructors at Technical Institutes of Nursing

Abstract

Context: The nursing program's success depends to a great extent on an effective clinical learning experience. Clinical instructors can utilize professional standards to identify areas for improvement in clinical practice. The importance of content validity of the developed standards and its relevance with reliability, have made it an essential step in the standards development.
Aim: This study aims to design and validate performance standards for clinical instructors at the Technical Institutes of Nursing. Methods: The methodological design was utilized. This study was conducted in two sectors: Technical Institutes of Nursing at Port Said and Ismailia City, and their practical training settings. Two groups of participants were included in the study: clinical instructors and experts’ groups. The data was collected using two tools: An observational checklist and an expert opinion sheet.

Results: The proposed performance standards had an appropriate level of content validity. The overall value of scale-content validity/universal agreement (S-CVI/UA) was equal to 0.852, and the overall value of scale-content validity/average (S-CVI/AVE) was equal to 0.988. The overall interrater reliability value of the proposed standards was 0.852. There were statistically significant differences between pre and post-dissemination of the proposed standards in the total mean percentages in all standards (p<0.001).

Conclusions: This study concluded that the proposed developed standards are acceptable for use in the Technical Institutes of Nursing. The study recommended that the developed standards be applied and communicated to all clinical instructors in the Technical Institutes of Nursing, with clinical instructors' training on its implementation.