Purpose: While competent faculty are critical to prepare the future geriatric workforce, we found no instrument measuring nursing faculty gerontological competency. This project is to develop a gerontological nursing competency questionnaire (GNCQ).
Methods: To obtain expert opinion, we distributed the GNCQ to 25 distinguished educators in gerontological nursing (DEGN) at the 2019 National Hartford Center for Gerontological Nursing Excellence (NHCGNE) Leadership conference. Participants rated 22 items, using a 4-point Likert scale on confidence in knowledge and teaching and interest in acquiring further training, commenting on GNCQ construction and comprehensiveness. We distributed the revised GNCQ to 53 DEGN 2020 awardees from the NHCGNE Leadership Conference using an online REDCapTM survey.
Results: The first round of expert participants were 96% female, 92% with doctoral education, and 32.64 mean years of experience. Using a cut-point of 2.90, results showed low confidence in knowledge of spiritual assessment (2.71) and sexual health assessment (2.63); low confidence in teaching spiritual assessment (2.63), sexual health (2.54), and management of chronic pain (2.88). DEGNs recommended adding diversity and cultural competency, health disparity, and caregiver role strain items. Following recommendations, we added 2 survey questions and a 5-point Likert scale. Of the 53 GNCQ surveys sent to the 2020 DEGNs, 18 were returned. Participants were 100% female, 88.9% doctorly educated, with 28.44 years of experience. Similar to the 2019 DEGNs, using a cut-point of 3.65, we found low confidence in knowledge about spiritual assessment (3.50), sexual health (3.56), and substance abuse (3.61) and low confidence in teaching about spiritual assessment (3.56), sexual health (3.61), and substance abuse (3.61). Interestingly, the 2 lowest scores for interest in acquiring new knowledge were for in the same areas of sexual health (3.94), and spiritual health (4.00). No recommendations for changes were made by the 2020 DEGN group.
Applicability: The 2020 DEGNs supported finding from the 2019 DEGN expert panel for content validity. We are distributing the revised online GNCQ2 to the 2018 DEGNs for further feedback. These data suggest that the GNCQ has promising potential for identifying the most important competency areas to be addressed for gerontological nursing faculty development.
Learning Outcome: After completing this learning activity, the participant will be able to assess innovations being used by other professionals in the specialty and evaluate the potential of implementing the improvements into practice.