Issues in the assessment of expert nurses: purposes, standards and methods

It is generally agreed that experts seek and use different information, and that the solutions they propose and implement are also different in kind and quality from those of non-experts. This makes assessment of experts a challenging problem. The difficulty of establishing standards and criteria by which the expert can be assessed should not necessarily prevent such assessment from being undertaken. However, the purpose of assessing experts should be clearly articulated before engaging in such practices, since different purposes may legislate different assessment methods. This paper canvasses concerns relating to the assessment of expert nurses, including: the definition of expertise; establishing standards of expert nursing performance; the training of appropriate assessors; and the choice of assessment method. Care needs to be exercised at all times to avoid obscuring the issues by concentration on assessing isolated expert behaviours to the exclusion of consideration of the underlying political purposes and the economic consequences of assessing expertise.