Development of a Questionnaire to Assess Nursing Competencies for the Care of People with Psychiatric Disabilities in a Hospital Environment

Abstract

The recovery of people with psychiatric disabilities requires high-quality nursing care. However, the existing research on the nursing competencies needed for caring for people with psychiatric disabilities have been based on a narrow competency framework. By adopting a broader competency framework, this study aimed to find the competencies needed for the nursing care of people with psychiatric disabilities in a hospital environment. Accordingly, a questionnaire will be developed to measure these competences. First, a literature review and interviews with psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, and people with psychiatric disabilities were conducted to develop the pool of competency items. Second, a pilot study was conducted to review the initial pool of items. Finally, a survey of 581 psychiatric nurses was used to conduct a series of principal component analyses to explore the structure of the questionnaire. The 17-item questionnaire included 5 factors, which accounted for 68.60% of the total variance: sense of responsibility, vocational identification, agreeableness, cooperation capacity, and carefulness; the Cronbach's alpha coefficients were 0.85, 0.85, 0.74, 0.80, and 0.77, respectively. Most of the competencies belonged to attitudes, values, and traits, which were overlooked in previous studies. The questionnaire has satisfactory internal reliability and structural validity, and could contribute some to the selection of the psychiatric workforce.

Psychometric properties of clinical competency assessment instruments for psychiatric nurses: A systematic review of literature

“…Half of the study tools ( n = 3, 50%) are for assessing the clinical competency of nurses working in the psychiatric ward, and 50% assess the clinical competency of undergraduate nursing students. Two instruments (33.3%) were self-evaluated[ 29 30 ] and the rest were performed by the observer. Quantitative face validity, and modified kappa statistic declining raters agreement by the chance, were not conducted in any article studied.…”

“…[ 26 ] has been compared competence between the two groups of freshman and senior nursing students, and in “Case Management Competence Scale” has been done between the two groups taught and without training about case management. “Objective Structured Mental Health Clinical Examination (MHOSCE”) tool and “Checklist of Clinical Competency in Mental Health Nursing Students” have no construct validity, but three tools[ 28 29 30 ] have factor analysis. Chen et al .…”

“…The reliability of self-evaluate tools “A Nurse Case Management Competence Scale” and “Nursing Competencies for the Care of People with Psychiatric Disabilities in a Hospital Environment” were supported with retest coefficient (≥0.90). [ 29 30 ] Except for brief point in Bondy et al . (1997)[ 26 ] study, in any of the articles under study has not been reported measurement error, which is a systematic and random error of patient score, and is not attributed to actual changes in the measured construct.…”

“…Data were extracted according to the following topics: The purpose of the study, the target population, the main findings, and the instrument characteristics [ Table 1 ]. [ 13 26 27 28 29 30 ]…”