Developing a Clinical Leadership Competency Assessment Tool for Registered Nurses, Thailand

Background: Thai nursing and midwifery council stated that leadership is one of core competencies required of registered nurses. All clinical nurses have primarily responsibility for coordinating and providing patient care which need to be good clinical leaders. The majority of leadership skills are developed through training the nurses over time in order to gain their abilities to inspire, encourage, and empower to provide quality nursing care. To identify clinical leadership competency among nurses, it is needed to use the reliable assessment tool. However, there is no existing assessment tools appropriate for Thai registered nurses. This paper focuses on how the Clinical Leadership Competency Assessment Tool was established, and represents the first phase of two phases in the tool development process.

Purpose: This study aimed to develop the Clinical Leadership Competency Assessment Tool for registered nurses in Thailand.

 Methods: A developmental research design was used for establishing the Clinical Leadership Competency Assessment Tool. The assessment tools consisted of five steps: reviewing the clinical leadership competency concept, generating the item pools, examining the content validity, examining the clarity and reliability, and examining the reliable data.  

 Results:

The concept of clinical leadership competencies was based on the Clinical Nursing Leadership Competency Model. The initial draft of the Clinical Leadership Competency Assessment Tool was generated as a 7-point rating scale. This tool was comprised of 5 dimensions, including 104 items. The 104 items was reviewed and suggested by 6 experts that the 102 items were revised. The Content Validity Index of the revised 102 items was 0.89. The face validity and feasibility of the tool was considered by 30 registered nurses working at Lum Phun hospital. All nurses were asked about the clarity, readability, and propriety of each item and overall dimension. There was no revision of the tool. Then, this tool was examined by 206 registered nurses who worked at Chiang Kam and Lum Phun hospital. The findings showed that the alpha coefficient of the overall scale was 0.97, and the 5 dimensions had the alpha coefficient within the range of 0.85 to 0.97.

 Conclusion: This study illustrated that the first Clinical Leadership Competency Assessment Tool is valid and reliable. However, this tool needs to be examined for constructing validity and reliability of the items. The findings will be beneficial to clinical nurses for understanding how to develop their own leadership competencies and administrative nurses for assessing clinical leadership competencies among their staffs.