Creating a National Standard for Prelicensure Clinical Evaluation in Nursing

Background: Measuring clinical outcomes in prelicensure students is desired by key stakeholders but is fraught with challenges. There are currently no standardized, psychometrically validated clinical-outcome measures available for prelicensure nursing programs, requiring each program to design its own measures. Method: We conducted a review of the potential antecedents of this gap, as well as models for standardized clinical outcome measures and recommendations from within health-professions education. Results:There are benefits to pursuing a standardized clinical outcome tool, including an improved student learning experience and unifying our communication regarding graduate nurse preparation to valued stakeholders. Conclusion: Nursing education has a unique opportunity to emulate our colleagues in medicine and pharmacy by working at the national level to create a standardized tool using current psychometric methods for development and validation.