Competency In Nursing: A Concept Analysis By Donna D.

I chose the article Competency in nursing: A concept analysis, which was written by Donna D. Scott Tilley PhD, RN. Tilley (2008) states that “competency is a topic of great interest to educators and administrators in practice disciplines, particularly healthcare disciplines such as nursing” (p. 58). The concept of competency is very subjective and there are no guidelines or ways to measure it. This article focuses on the role of competency in nursing and through a concept analysis process, various elements of competency were assessed.
To conduct the concept analysis, Tilley (2008) did “a review of nursing, medical, public health, and educational literature from the 5 years prior to January 2006” along with “landmark publications such as the
58). Tilley (2008) had used Walker and Avant’s seven step process for a structured analysis to “provide a framework for tracking knowledge, skills, and attitudes throughout a career” (p. 58).
The first step in conducting the concept analysis was to choose a concept, which was the role of competency in education. Tilley (2008) states that “a nurse is determined to be competent when initially licensed” and the “dominant method to assess a health care professional’s continued competency is traditional didactic continuing education” (p. 60). Tilley (2008) had also found that while certification may be used to indicate entry-level competency, there is no evidence of a correlation between certification and competency. Continuing education is the preferred way to demonstrate “continued competence for licensure renewal” (Tilley, 2008, p. 61). Due to advancements in technology and the widespread use of computers, competencies can be tracked by web-based systems. Tilley (2008) found that there are many issues that make it difficult to define competency, due to the large number of practicing nurses and nursing career (p. 61). There were three types of cases used to further analyze competency in education: a model case, a