Measuring Nursing Student Informatics Competencies with the Self-Assessment of Nursing Informatics Competencies Scale (SANICS-18)
Abstract
To ensure optimal patient outcomes, it is crucial that nurses are prepared for the rapid pace of technological innovation in healthcare. When the American Association of Colleges of Nurses (AACN) published new core competencies for nurses in 2021, they included informatics and healthcare technology competencies focused on using information and communication technologies effectively. Nursing informatics is an emerging field in which nurses collect, analyze and use data to provide care to diverse patient populations. For nursing educators to improve their curriculum with advancing technologies, it is important to judge student competencies and understand what student knowledge gaps exist. The goal of this project is to assess nursing student informatics competencies using an 18-item survey, the Self-Assessment of Nursing Informatics Competencies Scale (SANICS-18; Yoon, 2015). The SANICS-18 was given to students before and after they participated in a 7-week nursing informatics course. The SANICS-18 is a psychometrically valid and reliable scale that allows students to assess their own competency with each item by associating informatics skills with a 5-point Likert scale. The SANICS-18 had not previously been used in a pre- post-intervention study design. We collected 54 pre-intervention responses and 25-post intervention responses from RN-BSN nursing students enrolled in an informatics course at USC Upstate. A Mann-Whitney U test was performed on paired data (n = 21) with SPSS-v29 to determine significant differences between pre- and post-intervention item scores. Of the 18 items surveyed, there was a significant increase in competency scores for 14 items, demonstrating that the SANICS-18 is a useful instrument for measuring the impact of a nursing informatics course on informatics competencies.
Keywords
nursing informatics, healthcare innovation technologies, informatics competencies, self-assessment tool
Measuring Nursing Student Informatics Competencies with the Self-Assessment of Nursing Informatics Competencies Scale (SANICS-18)
CASB 103
To ensure optimal patient outcomes, it is crucial that nurses are prepared for the rapid pace of technological innovation in healthcare. When the American Association of Colleges of Nurses (AACN) published new core competencies for nurses in 2021, they included informatics and healthcare technology competencies focused on using information and communication technologies effectively. Nursing informatics is an emerging field in which nurses collect, analyze and use data to provide care to diverse patient populations. For nursing educators to improve their curriculum with advancing technologies, it is important to judge student competencies and understand what student knowledge gaps exist. The goal of this project is to assess nursing student informatics competencies using an 18-item survey, the Self-Assessment of Nursing Informatics Competencies Scale (SANICS-18; Yoon, 2015). The SANICS-18 was given to students before and after they participated in a 7-week nursing informatics course. The SANICS-18 is a psychometrically valid and reliable scale that allows students to assess their own competency with each item by associating informatics skills with a 5-point Likert scale. The SANICS-18 had not previously been used in a pre- post-intervention study design. We collected 54 pre-intervention responses and 25-post intervention responses from RN-BSN nursing students enrolled in an informatics course at USC Upstate. A Mann-Whitney U test was performed on paired data (n = 21) with SPSS-v29 to determine significant differences between pre- and post-intervention item scores. Of the 18 items surveyed, there was a significant increase in competency scores for 14 items, demonstrating that the SANICS-18 is a useful instrument for measuring the impact of a nursing informatics course on informatics competencies.