Background:

Clinical nursing instructors are the bridge for new nursing staff to adapt to clinical work. However, despite being skillful clinically, many clinical nursing instructors are not necessarily subject to enhancing their self-knowledge and skills to meet the rapidly changing needs in clinical teaching, especially evidence-based concepts and strategies.

Objectives:

This study was to explore the barriers of knowledge, perceived competence and participation in courses in evidence-based medicine on clinical nursing instructors.

Methods:

This was a cross-sectional study. Participants were recruited from a medical center in Southern Taiwan and required to have clinical nursing instructors’ qualifications. In addition to demographic data, our questionnaire included three parts:
1. experience of participating in evidence-based training courses;
2. perceived self-competence in evidence-based medicine (26 questions, 5-points of Likert scale), and;
3. a short form test of 10 scenarios (total score 100 points, with 10 points for each question).

Results:

A total of 224 clinical nursing instructors participated in this study. For 'experience of participation in evidence-based training courses', 58.5% had never used an evidence-based concept or strategy to write reports, and only 13.4% had participated in formal evidence-based training courses. The working units of 65.6% of participants did not hold any evidence-based training courses, while 67.4% participants had not actively participated in any training courses of evidence-based medicine in the past six months. In addition, in the perceived self-competence in evidence-based medicine survey, most items scored between 2-3 points, indicating that the level of self-perception of competence is between 25%-50%, with an average of 2.9.The average score of the short form test of scenarios was 43.1. Over 60% of clinical nursing instructors lack knowledge, self-perceived competence and active participation.

Conclusions:

This study suggests that more attention the problem that clinical nursing instructors’ competence cannot be qualified to lead the new staff in the learning of empirical skills.