Hospital nurse competencies: convergences and divergences in evaluation

Objective: To verify convergences and divergences between the self-assessment of nursing assistants and the assessments of immediate managers from the perspective of the list of professional nursing competencies. Methods: A descriptive study with a quantitative approach. Fifty-eight nurses from a federal university hospital in northern Brazil took part. Data was obtained using two questionnaires, one for professional self-assessment and one for the assessment of these professionals by their immediate nursing managers. Data analysis was carried out using descriptive statistics, with data centralization in the Microsoft Excel 2016 software. Results: Nurses adopted Managerial, Assistance, Attitudinal and Teaching professional competencies. The Managerial and Assistance groups stood out the most. Teamwork and Team Supervision were the most prominent Managerial competencies. Most of the competencies identified converged between self-assessment and performance evaluation by service managers. Continuing Education and Team Sizing appeared asymmetrically between the two types of evaluation. Among the care competencies, Systematization of Nursing Care and Clinical Reasoning were the most prominent. The Attitudinal competences were the group with the greatest divergence between the evaluations, followed by the Teaching/Preceptorship competence. Conclusion: There was evidence of subjectivity in the processes of evaluation and self-assessment of professional nursing competencies in the institution studied, which commonly generate dissonance when they are carried out. Most of the competences identified were in the Management and Care groups, showing convergence between the evaluation of professionals' performance by service managers and their self-assessment.