Essential Nursing Competencies

Regardless of medical specialty, all nurse practitioners must possess the essential competencies. These competencies are utilized at various institutions to create a curriculum that ensures students receive the knowledge, expertise, and abilities needed to exercise independently as licensed independent medical practitioners.

The nine broad areas of competency are:

1. Scientific Foundations

It guarantees that nurse practitioners have a solid foundation in medical sciences when they graduate. Nurse practitioner students must attend core pathophysiology and pharmacology courses depending on the specialty. Clinical practice rules, evidence-based Practice, translation study, and care of susceptible and varied patient populaces are all part of scientific core competency. I would use my scientific foundation abilities to conduct further research using evidence-based techniques to develop culturally acceptable and competent solutions to improve the quality of treatment at the community level.

2. Leadership

This focuses on professional advocacy and scholarship, ensuring that nurse practitioner students comprehend their scope of Practice and are prepared to lead a variety of health care teams. Cultural diversity and communication skills, on the other hand, maybe involved. I would be able to effectively carry out community health programs with essential skills such as effective communication, decision-making, and problem-solving capabilities through leadership skills, thereby improving the community’s health statistics.

3. Quality

Refers to the extent to which health services meet professional knowledge and standards to improve intended health outcomes. Nurses must apply their professional skills and expertise to provide high-quality patient care and service delivery with little harm and errors. Comprehending how to access and use data databases and analyze research findings analytically are fundamental quality aptitudes. I would be able to use these skills to improve the quality of care in the community by combining them with the necessary skills and knowledge to improve health status and outcomes.

4. Practice Inquiry

This is more focused on translation research, in which nurse practitioners should be able to adapt academic research to the clinical situation. This makes it easier for nurse practitioners to understand how to use research to enhance patient health outcomes. On a social level, at the community level, I plan to use this in a future field study to identify various community concerns and discover the best approach to improve care.

5. Technology and Information Literacy

During service delivery, this term denotes the use of digital technology, communication tools, and network entrance to manage, integrate, assess, and produce successful communication. Nurse practitioners should use technology to mend their patients’ safety and health outcomes. Nurses should use this to explain diseases and treatments to patients, and caregivers motivate patients and caregivers to make reasonable changes and excel at complex decision-making. This talent can be used in the community by using various technology strategies to educate the community, such as multiple social media platforms to inform the community on healthy behaviors and lifestyles as preventative measures to enhance health status and outcomes.

6. Policy

These are health-related decisions that impact the allocation of health properties at the organizational, local, state, national, and global levels. Nurses use this to influence laws to expand health and social challenges such as poverty, literacy, and violence to aid the population in combating these issues. Students may be required to take health care policies to apply the interdependence of clinical practice policies, promote ethical approaches to health, and aid in creating additional health policies. Nurses can utilize this as an advocacy tactic to empower individuals in the community by giving them accurate knowledge about their rights to care.

7. Health Delivery System

It is the process of designing, developing, and implementing public and community health programs. Nurse practitioners use this to improve healthcare outcomes, produce culturally appropriate care, and make organizational decisions. Examines how the healthcare system affects all stakeholders. It also aids nurses in critically considering organizational structures and resource distribution. After assessing various gaps, nurses can apply the health delivery system by creating and implementing health implementation at the community level to provide adequate health care.

8. Ethics

Understanding the ethical consequences of scientific improvements and learning to convey ethical dilemmas unique to the nurse-patient population is part of this course. It assists nurse practitioners in making decisions, analyzing the impact of all decisions, and comprehending ethical intricacies in providing health care to individuals. Nurses can manage community health challenges without reluctance, thanks to their ethical skills. They can also offer care while adhering to the rules and providing high-quality care through decision-making. This may entail activities such as maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of community information.

9. Independent Practice

This ensures that a nurse practitioner can practice independently as a registered independent practitioner with a recognized scientific knowledge base who is legally entitled to provide care and services without direction or supervision. This includes assessing, diagnosing, and treating patients within the student population. As a result, nurses can work professionally while maintaining the most excellent level of accountability, managing both diagnosed and undiagnosed patients as independent practitioners. Nurses should deliver high-quality treatment as independent health care providers in the community using critical thinking, as certain decisions may not require clinical intervention. Nurses should comprehend patients’ requirements from a cultural viewpoint and provide culturally appropriate and competent care to promote patient safety and enhance quality outcomes.

Nurses’ competencies have been widely applied to the community level, where nurses can employ these strategies at all levels to improve community health. They have contributed to improving care services by ensuring that nurses have the necessary knowledge, skills, and experience to provide high-quality care and enhance patient outcomes.

References

Hicks, K. E., Rico, J., & Beauchesne, M. (2018). Core curriculum and competencies: A multisite analysis of postgraduate training programs for primary care nurse practitioners. Journal of Professional Nursing, 34(6), 454-462.