BACKGROUND: Nurses play an important role in pharmaceutical care. They are involved in: detecting clinical change; communicating/discussing pharmacotherapy with patients, their advocates, and other healthcare professionals; proposing and implementing medication-related interventions; and ensuring follow-up of patients and medication regimens. To date, a framework of nurses' competences on knowledge, skills, and attitudes as to interprofessional pharmaceutical care tasks is missing. OBJECTIVES: To reach agreement with experts about nurses' competences for tasks in interprofessional pharmaceutical care. METHODS: A two-phase study starting with a scoping review followed by five Delphi rounds was performed. Competences extracted from the literature were assessed by an expert panel on relevance by using the RAND/UCLA method. The experts (n = 22) involved were healthcare professionals, nurse researchers, and educators from 14 European countries with a specific interest in nurses' roles in interprofessional pharmaceutical care. Descriptive statistics supported the data analysis. RESULTS: The expert panel reached consensus on the relevance of 60 competences for 22 nursing tasks. Forty-one competences were related to 15 generic nursing tasks and 33 competences were related to seven specific nursing tasks. CONCLUSIONS: This study resulted in a competence framework for competency-based nurse education. Future research should focus on imbedding these competences in nurse education. A structured instrument should be developed to assess students' readiness to achieve competence in interprofessional pharmaceutical care in clinical practice.

ANASTE Humanitas Foundation Rome Italy

Department of Nursing Laboratory of Integrated Health Care University of Peloponnese Tripolis Greece

Department of Nursing Midwifery and Health Care University of Wales Swansea UK

Department of Nursing Universitat d'Alacant Alacant Spain https twitter com manuellilloc

Faculty of Health and Welfare Østfold University College Halden Norway

Faculty of Health Sciences University of Primorska Izola Slovenia

Faculty of Nursing and Professional Health Studies Slovak Medical University in Bratislava Bratislava Slovakia

Higher School of Nursing of Coimbra Health Sciences Research Unit Nursing Coimbra Portugal

Institute of Nursing Sciences Basic Health Sciences and Health Visiting University of Pecs Faculty of Health Sciences Pecs Hungary

Institute of Nursing Theory and Practice Charles University 1st Faculty of Medicine Praha Czech Republic

Medical Faculty Institute of Health and Nursing Sciences Martin Luther Universitat Halle Wittenberg Halle Germany

Nursing and Midwifery Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences University of Antwerp Wilrijk Belgium

Pugliese Ciaccio Hospital Cantazaro Italy

Research Group Care for the Chronically Ill HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht Utrecht the Netherlands

Saint Kliment Ohridski University Bitola Bitola Macedonia

References provided by Crossref.org

Cross-sectional evaluation of pharmaceutical care competences in nurse education: how well do curricula prepare students of different educational levels?

Nurses and Pharmaceutical Care: Interprofessional, Evidence-Based Working to Improve Patient Care and Outcomes