Development of basic nursing competence among third- and fourth-year students

Introduction: in an environment where scientific evidence and best clinical practices are constantly developing, it is crucial that nurses are trained and evaluated on their skills and competencies to face the latest advances and findings in the field of health. Objective: to evaluate the development of basic nursing competencies in third- and fourth-year students. Method: a descriptive and cross-sectional observational study was carried out; the universe was 218 third- and fourth-year students of a nursing training program, the sample of 140 students was calculated under a confidence level of 95 % and margin of error of 5 % and was selected in a simple randomized way; the Basic Competence Scale in Fundamental Nursing Practice was used, structured by 25 items classified in 5 domains. SPSS software for Windows, version 26.0, was used for data analysis and descriptive statistics were calculated, including means and standard deviations, frequency and percentage. Results: most of the students were women in the third year of training, whose age ranged from 21 to 24 years. The lowest-performing skills were the ability to understand the reasons for prescribing specific medications for patients, the ability to make prompt corrections to patient care plans based on assessments, and the ability to comprehensively consolidate the information gathered into a written report. The most developed skill was the ability to use communication skills to communicate with caregivers. Conclusions: the domain evaluated as having the lowest performance were skills in basic biomedical sciences, in relation to communication skills where higher performance is evidenced