Development and Validation of a Competency Self-Assessment Tool for The Nurse Interns

Abstract

Contents: Nurse Interns need more attention to their self-confidence and self-assessment abilities. Self-assessment is an essential approach for testing their knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
Aim: This study aimed to develop a competency self-assessment tool for nurse interns and test its validity and reliability.
Methods: Methodological study for the development of a tool. The study was carried out at Ain-Shams University Hospitals on all 89-nurse interns in the internship year, and a jury group of 21 faculty members and 21 nurse managers for validation. The researchers developed a preliminary self-assessment tool with six selected nursing core competencies presented to the jury group for validation.

Results: The finalized tool had a very high total face CVI-S (0.99). The CVI-S ranged between 0.94 for environmental safety and hazardous materials safety and 1.00 for the content validity's attitude scale. The total scale had a CVI-S as high as 0.98. The tool had excellent overall reliability with a Cronbach alpha coefficient as high as 0.901 and an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.888. The attitude scale also had excellent reliability with a Cronbach alpha coefficient of 0.965 and an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.964. In the application of the tool, 95.5% of the nurse interns considered their competencies adequate. In terms of grades, only 32.6% and 10.1% considered themselves to have very good and excellent competencies, respectively, and 70.8% had a positive attitude toward self-assessment.

Conclusion: A valid and reliable competency self-assessment tool was developed for nurse interns; it can be applied in various nursing internship programs. It could be used by the administrators of the internship programs to identify the individual learning and training needs of nurse interns. Further studies are proposed to evaluate the utility of the tool in evaluating and improving these programs.