Essential professional core competencies for nurses

Core competency is vital to the nursing profession. Such helps guarantee the high quality and effectiveness of delivered care and maintains the social value and status of the nursing profession. This article introduces the definition of nursing core competency and its connotations. The core competency profile for the nursing profession embraces basic behavioral attributes as well as mastery of advanced practice skills. The former include such attributes as gentleness, willingness to serve, keen observation and judgment, efficiency, skillfulness, responsibility and accountability. The latter embraces skills in general care, communication and collaboration, management, self-development, innovation and research, and stress-adjustment. To cultivate competent nurses, academic education should emphasize critical thinking skills, integrate problem-based and evidence-based learning approaches into curricula, and use objective structured clinical examination to evaluate learning outcomes. In the healthcare sector, systematic professional training models such as the clinical ladder with multidiscipline rotation hold the potential to train novice nurses as expert professionals. Meanwhile, to advance the professional capabilities of nurses, nursing administrators should provide a positive work environment to fuel and maintain learning motivation. Education and healthcare systems should work closely together to promote the professional competence of nurses and to strengthen the value of the nursing profession.