Critical care competencies.

In the absence of nationally accepted critical care competencies, each educational institution providing critical care programmes is forced to define the essential competencies necessary for practice, leading to variations in expected practice and the emergence of 'postcode' competencies. This research report aims to build upon competency activity for all areas of nursing practice within critical care levels 1, 2 and 3. A functional analysis to elicit core critical care competency statements was conducted and a modified Delphi technique was used to generate consensus opinion from a pan-London purposive sample of nurses working in critical care. The functional analysis group identified four competency statements and elements of competencies. Consensus agreement of 80% was achieved with mean agreement scores that exceed 97%. A core critical care competency framework was refined and developed by expert nurses drawing on their own experience and knowledge of critical care nursing. The framework could be useful to: educationalists designing competency-based curricula; critical care managers as a tool for recruitment and retention and for education and training of staff; individual critical care nurses to facilitate continuous professional development.