The Self Assessed Clinical Judgment Competencies of Newly Graduated Nurses Post Internship in Kenya

The purpose of this study was to determine the self assessed clinical judgment competencies of new graduates post internship in Kenya as a way of evaluating whether the internship program is adequate in assisting the new nurse graduates become safe practitioners.

Nursing is a practice discipline that requires theoretical knowledge to be translated into clinical practice; that is patient care. Educators, employers, and other stakeholders have raised concern that new nurse graduates are not competent to offer safe patient care even after one year of internship. In order to promote patient safety there is need to evaluate the ability of the nurses in order to identify gaps in training.

The research design was descriptive cross sectional. Data was collected using structured self assessment electronic data collection tool. This was administered to the respondent's via a web link. The study population was 183 new nurse graduates who had completed their internship program and had been licensed by the Nursing Council of Kenya between January 2011 and October 2013. The sampling was done using stratified random sampling with clusters based on the university where they did their undergraduate training. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 17 was used to analyze the data.

The results showed that new nurse graduate's competency is at advanced beginner level for the majority of the respondents with a very small percentage being competent in the aspects of clinical judgment.

From this finding it can be concluded that new nurse graduates who complete internship in Kenya have inadequate clinical judgment abilities and may require more assistance to develop these skills.