Developing Clinical Nursing Education Standards in Iran Based on International Standards

Accreditation is one of the most important quality assurance and improvement methods in medical sciences education, especially in the field of nursing clinical education. However, there are not compiled standards in this regard and employing international standards does not seem to be practical. Accordingly, the researchers in this study tried to develop the national standards for accrediting clinical nursing education based on international standards as well as the viewpoints of nursing education experts in Iran. This study was performed in multiple stages during the years 2004 to 2005. At first, using international standards of nursing education and the views of expert faculty members by Delphi technique, proper standards for the context of Iran were developed. Then, the proposed standards were investigated through a national survey using a designed questionnaire and the ones with more than 70% consensus were approved. At the end, the standards for clinical education were presented separately. Fifty five standards in 5 domains including faculty members and clinical preceptors, students, curriculum, clinical facilities and teaching-learning activities were proposed for the accreditation of clinical nursing education in Iran. The proposed standards had mostly more than 90% of optimum level. However, it seems that the lack of appropriateness of some standards is due to the present situation in nursing education system in Iran. So, these standards were revised or omitted based on expert's comments.