Nurse educator competence in four European countries—A comparative cross-sectional study

Abstract

<h3>Aim</h3><p>The aim of this article is to describe and compare the nurse educator competences in four European countries using three different evaluators: nurse educators (<em>n</em> = 329), heads of a nursing subject (<em>n</em> = 60) and student nurses (<em>n</em> = 1058).</p><h3>Design</h3><p>The study was conducted as a comparative cross-sectional survey in Finland, Malta, Slovakia and Spain between May 2021 and February 2022.</p><h3>Methods</h3><p>The data were collected with an online survey. The instrument used was a 20-item Tool for Evaluation of Requirements of Nurse Teachers, utilizing a 5-point Likert-type scale. The data were analysed statistically and reported according to STROBE guidelines.</p><h3>Results</h3><p>Nurse educators' competence evaluated positively in all the groups of evaluators, with a mean of >3.5. The self-evaluation of nurse educators' competence was higher than the other evaluators' evaluations. Having a degree in nursing, having completed some pedagogical studies and longer work experience as a nurse educator had a positive association with higher self-evaluated competence among nurse educators.</p><h3>Conclusions</h3><p>Nurse educator competence is at a good level in the selected European countries, but further studies are required to find the reasons behind the differences in evaluations.</p><h3>Public Contribution</h3><p>Each participating educational institution named a contact person who distributed the surveys to the participants and returned the study's metadata to the researchers.</p>