Measurement of clinical nurse performance: Developing a tool including contextual items

Assessment of nurse performance plays an important role in guaranteeing high quality clinic care to achieve desired patient outcomes. Many tools measuring nurse performance in clinical settings have different dimensions of nurse skills. The objective of this research is to develop and test a new performance assessment tool incorporating applicable task and contextual performance items to measure clinical nurse’s performance. Thirty-eight performance items were derived from previously cited literature and some tools that were in use. A questionnaire containing all items under eight categories was designed to reveal the appropriateness levels of the items. It was distributed to 233 clinical nurses from different hospitals in one city, who were asked to score them on a seven-point scale. The results indicate that although clinical skill and professional skill are the most important categories, the most scored item is “Working systematically” (mean = 6.07, s.d. = 0.89) in contextual category.