Courting competency: nursing and the politics of performance in practice

Nurses have long anguished over how best to assess performance in clinical practice. The 'competency' movement appears to have provided a solution to this problem. In this paper I undertake a 'radical hermeneutic' interrogation of the cultural text of clinical practice doubled with a poststructuralist interpretation of the literal text of the Australian competency project. Through this work I attempt to expose some of the deeply embedded assumptions that underwrite the competency movement and amplify the problems posed by an uncritical appropriation of competency based training and assessment in nursing education.