Meta competency, prerequisites improving the postgraduate psychiatric nursing students' clinical competency: a qualitative study.

Background: Clinical education helps learners achieve the desired clinical competency. By identifying the influential factors, education will be more effective. One of the necessary prerequisites is meta-competency. Therefore, to improve education, this study aims to describe the meta-competencies required for postgraduate psychiatric nursing students.

Materials and methods: A qualitative content analysis was conducted from November 2019 to August 2020 in the universities offering a postgraduate psychiatric nursing degree in Iran. Twenty-one participants were sampled purposefully, including postgraduate psychiatric nursing students and instructors, psychiatric nurses, psychologists, and psychiatrists with at least 2 years of experience working in psychiatric settings. It was performed to obtain data saturation. Data collected through individual semi-structured interviews were analyzed using conventional content analysis.

Results: Meta competency included three categories of "thinking and clinical reasoning skills", "dynamic learning", and "human and organizational management".

Conclusion: The findings of this study revealed that psychiatric nurses' meta-competency concept was multidimensional. The findings of this study can be useful in educating and assessing psychiatric nursing students' meta-competency. Further studies are required on psychiatric nurses' meta-competency.