Nurses' core emergency competencies for COVID-19 in China: A cross-sectional study

To investigate nurses' core emergency competencies for handling the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) and analyse the factors associated with those competencies.

COVID-19 has become a major global public health event. Nursing staff have played an important role in COVID-19 prevention and control. Understanding their emergency competencies for handling COVID-19, and the potential disadvantages will help governments to develop targeted training policies and improve nurses' capacities in relation to pandemics and emergency preparedness.

COVID-19 is a disastrous infectious disease, but the competencies of nurses in China to handle COVID-19 have not been well documented.

We conducted a cross-sectional survey on nurses from 22 provinces of China in February 2020. The scores of self-report questionnaires were used to analyse their competencies for core emergency care, and linear regression analysis was used to explore influential factors.

A total of 2570 nurses participated. The study revealed that nurses had a good grasp of COVID-19 knowledge, but the majority of nurses lacked experience in isolation ward work and emergency training. We found that age, professional title, work department, major work content, total work time, disaster rescue history, emergency training and infectious disease training were associated with core emergency competencies.

Chinese nurses were qualified for handling COVID-19 but still need to strengthen the accumulation of practical experience.

Nurses should actively participate in emergencies to strengthen their operational capacity, whether in training or actual practice.

Managers should improve relevant policies to ensure that nurses have more opportunities to participate in the practical training of health emergencies and explore effective training methods to improve the ability of nurses to respond to these.