The development of a clinical nurse instructor evaluation tool: The need to consult more widely

Dear Editor,

Shahsavari et al. have presented an excellent account of the development and psychometric testing of a clinical nurse instructor evaluation tool.[1] Certainly, the evaluation tool has been put through a rigorous process that is made up of the steps typically necessary in the evaluation of tool development. However, a caveat may be that the tool might not have received input from all the relevant stakeholders. It surely did receive adequate feedback from the nursing students and nursing faculty members – nonetheless, there are other players in this domain that could have been involved. One such group is patients. We increasingly wish healthcare professional education to be learner centric and, at the same time, we wish it to be patient centric.[2] Indeed, healthcare professional education should be more than just an academic exercise – its explicit purpose should be to drive clinical quality improvement in the care of patients.[3] Thus, perhaps patients could have been involved to ensure that what clinical nurse instructors were teaching and how they were teaching was compatible with the needs and desires of the patients and lay people. Another important group is nurses’ interprofessional colleagues, including allied healthcare professionals and doctors. Education for healthcare professions should be and increasingly is interdisciplinary – students and teachers from all the professions can and should learn from each other.[4] So, it would have been reasonable to hear the views of perhaps physiotherapists on how clinical nurse instructors should teach their juniors. These additional steps would likely have made the development process even more rigorous and the resulting tool even more educationally sound.

Yours Sincerely,

Dr Kieran Walsh