IRANIAN NURSES' COMPETENCY: AN INTEGRATIVE REVIEW

Competency is a core ability to perform nursing responsibilities and has a direct impact on patients' health and safety. In this regard, evaluating, maintaining, and developing nurse competency has become one of the main and important tasks of professional managers. The purpose of the study was to investigate the nurses' competency studies conducted in Iran through an integrated review and analysis of the related challenges.

This integrated review study consisted of five steps, including specifying the review purpose, searching the literature, evaluating data from primary sources, analyzing data, and presenting the results suggested by Knafl & Whittemore. Databases like SID, IranDOC, Scopus, CINAHL, PubMed, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect were searched using the keywords of competency, competence, assessment or evaluation of competency. The initial comprehensive search result consisted of 488 articles. After applying inclusion criteria and assessing the articles using the Bowling's Quality Assessment Tool, finally 19 studies were included.

After a thorough evaluation of the articles, results were itemized as following categories: a) Study factors, including concept of competency, evaluation methods, research tools, type of research, type of sampling, study wards and places, b) population factors including the demographic characteristics of the participants, c) the type of intervention designed to promote the competency of nurses, head nurses, and managers, and d) the competency correlation with other concepts. Finally, the related challenges were identified.

Competency as a vital feature of nurses should be included in the periodic evaluation of nurses and the continuation of the job must be dependent on obtaining the necessary qualifications. The results show that competency as a concept needs to be examined in-depth and there are some problems and challenges in planning and implementing related studies. It is hoped that findings of this study will be effective in promoting quality of nursing competency studies in Iran.