Exploring the Concept of Nurses' Healthcare Policy Competence: A Systematic Review and Qualitative Meta-Synthesis

Nurses' competence in healthcare policy is crucial for policy intervention to strengthen public health equity and resolve health problems through healthcare policy reforms. Previous studies conducted systematic reviews, scoping reviews, or meta-syntheses related to the political competence of nurses, factors affecting nurses' policy interventions, and barriers and facilitators of policy intervention, but the concept of healthcare policy competence was not examined.

This study explored nurses' competence in healthcare policy through a systematic review and meta-synthesis of previous qualitative studies.

A systematic review of English-language journal articles in databases including Medline, Embase, PubMed, CINAHL, Web of Science, and Scopus published up to December 31, 2023, generated 17,810 identified articles, of which 27 individual studies were used for analysis. Researchers with rich experiences in healthcare policy interventions and qualitative research analysis extracted data using ATLAS.ti and meta-synthesized it.

Nurses' competence in healthcare policy was synthesized into five factors: intrinsic motivation, healthcare expertise, policy development, political skills, and policy intervention. Fifteen themes and 34 subthemes were derived as subattributes.

This study provides a conceptual framework for nurses' competence in healthcare policy and for developing political or policy education or programs to strengthen this competence.