The Challenges and the Approaches to Acquiring Clinical Competence in Iran: A Review Study

Nurses’ clinical competence, as the basic component of nursing care, is a very important and vital issue. Nursing competence has always been a challenging issue. In order to maintain the standards of nursing care, it is necessary to know the methods of developing and promoting clinical competence. The present study aims to examine and review the challenges and the approaches to obtaining clinical competence in Iran, so that the obtained results can help nursing managers and lecturers with promoting nursing competence, whose ultimate goal is to provide quality care to the patient.

The present research is a review study. The articles written in Farsi or English were included in the study. They were extracted using Farsi databases including SID and Magiran and Latin databases including ProQuest, Science Direct, Google Scholar, Ovid, PubMed. The search was conducted with no time limit until March 2020 and using the keywords nursing competence, nursing clinical competence and competence. After the careful examination of the title, the abstract and the full text of each article, a large number of articles were excluded due to the languages in which they had been written, different titles and purposes and inappropriate abstracts or contents. In the next step, 71 articles (44 Farsi and 27 English) were studied and, finally, 23 articles were included in the study.

Ethical Considerations: 

In order to organize this research, while observing the authenticity of the texts, honesty and fidelity have been observed.

The educational and clinical challenges were investigated, along with the relevant approaches. Unmotivated students and inexperienced nurses’ low level of competence are among the mentioned challenges. Taking both educational and clinical measures, as an effective approach to improving clinical competence, will help reduce the gap between education and clinical practice.

Through recognizing the aforementioned challenges and approaches to improving clinical competence in nurses, it will be possible to ensure quality care provision, which is an important step in developing the health system. The recommended approaches include modifying the curriculum, increasing critical thinking skills in students and professors, increasing professors’ clinical and communicational skills, professors’ using different teaching methods and holding workshops and in-service training courses for nursing personnel and instructors.