Archived Professional News: April 2005

Using competency standards to your advantage

During my time as ANF Federal Professional Officer, competency standards have become increasingly interesting to me. My interest relates to how nurses can use competency standards, rather than how they are used by regulatory authorities and educators.

While nurses tend to see competency standards as something that is used against them, I think  they should see them as a strong tool for their own use.

Competency standards are prepared by the profession and should reflect the work being done by nurses now.

As such, they can be an excellent professional framework against which to measure your professional practice and plan your professional development.

The national competency standards, prepared by the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Council and endorsed by the nurse regulatory authorities, are a good starting point, but there are also specialist nursing standards.

Specialist nursing competency standards are generally not developed by nurse regulatory authorities, but are prepared by the relevant specialist nursing organisations.

Many of them can be found by using the links to member organisations on the National Nursing Organisations web page at www.anf.org.au/NNO.

Nurses can use specialist nursing competency standards to measure their professional practice, prepare for a move into a specialist area, or plan an application for a clinical specialist grade (however titled).

A useful set of competency standards for registered nurses who don’t consider themselves specialist nurses are those for advanced nurses.  Recently these have been reviewed, and should be re-released in the middle of this year.

Many specialist and advanced nurses are looking forward to the endorsement of competency standards for nurse practitioners, a project now underway with the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Council, in conjunction with the New Zealand nurse regulatory authority. This report has been released, and is available through the ANMC website at www.anmc.org.au. 

An ANF-managed project to develop competency standards for nurses in general practice, funded by the Australian Department of Health and Ageing, concluded in February 2005.

The project team produced standards for both registered nurses and enrolled nurses (RN Div 2) in general practice. These standards are currently with the Department of Health and Ageing, but are soon to be released.

Competency standards are a professional framework that nurses can use to their advantage – I urge all nurses to take ownership of the competency standards and use them.

Victoria Gilmore
ANF Federal Professional Officer