Creating a National Standard for Prelicensure Clinical Evaluation in Nursing.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Measuring clinical outcomes in prelicensure students is desired by key stakeholders but is fraught with challenges. There are currently no standardized, psychometrically validated clinical-outcome measures available for prelicensure nursing programs, requiring each program to design its own measures. METHOD: We conducted a review of the potential antecedents of this gap, as well as models for standardized clinical outcome measures and recommendations from within health-professions education. RESULTS: There are benefits to pursuing a standardized clinical outcome tool, including an improved student learning experience and unifying our communication regarding graduate nurse preparation to valued stakeholders. CONCLUSION: Nursing education has a unique opportunity to emulate our colleagues in medicine and pharmacy by working at the national level to create a standardized tool using current psychometric methods for development and validation. [J Nurs Educ. 2021;60(12)686-689.].