Skills for nursing practice: Development of clinical skills in pre-registration nurse education

• Practice skills required of newly qualified nurses can be divided into 7 themes.
• Contemporary services require newly qualified nurses to be equipped with skills and confidence. This expectation was previously applied to more experienced practitioners.
• A broad conceptualisation of clinical skills is needed to help deal with concerns regarding the theory-practice gap.
• Focusing on practice skills can promote an integrated approach to curriculum development.

Rapid changes during the past two decades have seen a growing challenge to prepare newly qualified nurses who are clinically competent and confident to meet the demands of contemporary healthcare. Recent publications emphasise the need to prioritise clinical skills in nurse education (DH 2012a, Francis, 2012). This discussion reports on a project scoping the clinical skills required within pre-registration nursing curricula and considers how this has influenced curriculum development at one Higher Education Institution in the UK.This paper reports on the project analysis of nursing and healthcare policy, identifying six core themes of skills relevant for nursing practice. Furthermore it explores the findings of a series of focus groups with nursing practitioners and managers identifying priorities for clinical skills in the pre-registration curriculum. These highlighted a broad range of skills required of newly qualified practitioners, which pose a challenge for integration within nurse education. How this challenge has been addressed through the incorporation of these skills themes throughout a new pre-registration curriculum is also examined.