Psychometric properties of public health nursing competency assessment tools: A systematic review

To evaluate the psychometric properties of existing public health nursing competency assessment tools and provide evidence for selecting suitable instruments for future research.

Public health nurses will play an increasingly vital role in the future of public health. Therefore, appropriate competency assessment tools are needed to evaluate current competencies and training outcomes. Although several public health nursing competency assessment scales exist, no study has systematically reviewed and compared them.

This study is a systematic review conducted in accordance with the COSMIN guidelines.

Seven Chinese and English databases (CNKI, VIP, Wanfang, PubMed, Web of Science, Embase and Cochrane) were searched from inception to December 24, 2024. The extracted measurement properties included content validity, structural validity, internal consistency, cross-cultural validity and reliability. The COSMIN methodology for systematic review was applied to evaluate the quality of evidence, rate measurement properties, perform data synthesis and determine the overall grading of the instruments.

18 studies reported 13 different versions of tools. Content validity-covering relevance, comprehensiveness and comprehensibility-was mostly rated as "doubtful." Internal consistency, assessed using Cronbach's alpha, was rated "very good" for all instruments. Other measurement properties were often untested. EIDM, PHNCI and MCQ-PHN were rated as A recommendations, while the remaining 10 instruments were rated as B recommendations.

Future studies should comprehensively evaluate all measurement properties, as several remain insufficiently examined or reported. The development of related instruments is recommended to follow the COSMIN guidelines.