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.
Materials & Methods: 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.
Results: 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.
Conclusion: 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.