The sample for this study consisted of 127 newly graduated nurses from a Midwestern state who successfully passed the NCLEX-RN. Participants who graduated from a basic registered nursing program were asked to reflect upon their confidence level and competence for medical-surgical clinical skills. The National League for Nursing (NLN), in its 2005 Position Statement on Transforming Nursing Education, stated that nursing education programs must be designed to be flexible to meet constantly changing demands and individual student learning needs, and be accessible and responsive to diverse student populations (NLN, 2005). The more recent NLN initiative (NLN, 2010) called for expanding diversity in the nurse educator workforce. This initiative required a more multicultural group of graduates from nursing programs who are both competent and confident in their nursing skills to go on to join the nursing education work force. Participants voluntarily completed an electronic questionnaire containing the Self-Efficacy in Clinical Performance Scale (Cheraghi et al., 2009) and the Casey-Fink Readiness for Practice Survey (Casey et al., 2011).
This research study served to extend prior research and to provide a starting point for assessing self-reported self-efficacy as a factor in developing clinical skills competence of new nurses. According to current literature on clinical competence there was a gap between nursing education and clinical practice among newly graduated nurses. The focus of the most current research pertained to the development of new teaching strategies in clinical nursing education in order to improve patient outcomes. By exploring the relationship between new graduate nurse competence and self-efficacy, nurse educators can find useful information from new graduates pertaining to their own self-efficacy and clinical skills competence. There has been little research dedicated to assessing the importance of self-efficacy in relation to clinical performance (Townsend & Scanlan, 2011).
Results demonstrated a strong, positive relationship between self-efficacy and clinical skills competence with no significant difference between self-efficacy and clinical skills competence between different ethnic groups of newly graduated nurses. This study demonstrated the importance of the clinical instructor-student nurse relationship in the assessment of self-reported self-efficacy. Due to the small sample size and limited number of multicultural participants from one Midwestern state there was a limitation to generalizability to the general population. Future studies could include a control group of faculty who rate students’ level of self-efficacy using a more objective approach to the evaluation of clinical skills competence.