title: Assessment of mental health nursing competence using level III academic marking criteria: the Eastbourne assessment of practice scale.
abstract: The assessment of clinical competence in nursing represents a challenge to the profession. There is a need for assessment of practice skills through evaluative observation of performance but unfortunately such methods are not regularly used as a basis for assessment within most academic nursing institutions. Instead there is still a reliance upon more traditional types of academic assessment usually done through a written medium. Such methods whilst academically rigorous do not easily assess actual real life competence. This paper will describe how this tension was addressed through the development of a tool that combines observation of real life practice and viva style questioning with an assessment marking grid whose descriptors represent level III practice. Its inter rater reliability (rs = 0.88, P < 0.01) was established by 14 clinical nurse specialists in cognitive behaviour therapy who assessed a single video taped recording of a post-registration students performance whilst undergoing training in cognitive behaviour therapy.
authors.affiliation: BAHardcastle@com.puserve.com
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hardcastle
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence / Q000592:standards*; D015928:Cognitive Behavioral Therapy / Q000193:education; D004508:Education, Nursing, Baccalaureate / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D009720:Nurse Clinicians; D015402:Nursing Education Research; D015588:Observer Variation; D011568:Psychiatric Nursing / Q000193:education*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014743:Videotape Recording