Internationally educated nurses’ competency assessment and registration outcomes

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships between internationally educated nurses’ (IENs’) performance in a registered nurse competency assessment process and the outcomes of their nursing registration applications. Assessments of nursing practice competencies, IEN applicant characteristics and registration outcomes were explored. Design/methodology/approach This is a secondary statistical analysis of a subset of IEN application data from a previous study in combination with assessment data from an additional database. Application data between 2008 and 2011 were analyzed using univariate/bivariate analyses and regression models to explore the relationship of performance in the assessment process and outcomes of the registration process. Findings Competency categories IEN applicants had difficulties with (from least to most) were Professional Responsibility and Accountability, Ethical Practice, Self-Regulation, Service to the Public, Knowledge-Based Practice: Specialized Body of Knowledge and Knowledge-Based Practice: Competent Application of Knowledge. IENs educated in the UK and USA had the highest scores and odds of meeting competencies. Applicants educated in India and Asia had lower scores and odds ratios. All national entry-to-practice examination and registration eligibility competencies were significantly related to registration outcomes. Applicants passing the exam had higher competency scores while applicants ineligible for registration had lower competency scores. Research limitations/implications Limitations include integrity of data extracted from active databases, IEN motivation to complete the RN registration process and conversion of assessment scales for research analysis. Originality/value Results inform regulation policies that improve IEN registration processes and may be informative to regulators, assessment centers, educational institutions and IENs.

Using Business Rules within a Design Process of Active Databases

Modeling behavior is an important task of the information system engineering process. This task is especially important when information systems are centered on active databases, which allow the replacement of parts of application programs with active rules. To relieve programmers from using either traditional or ad hoc techniques to design active databases, it is necessary to develop new techniques to model business rules. For that reason, inclusion of rules during analysis and design stages becomes an actual requirement. In this paper, we propose a uniform approach to modeling business rules (active rules, integrity constraints, etc. ). To improve the behavior specification, we extend the state diagrams that are widely used for dynamic modeling. This extension is a transformation of state transitions according to rule semantics. In addition, we outline new functionalities of Computer Aided System Engineering (CASE) to take into consideration the active database specificities. In this way, the designer can be assisted to control, maintain, and reuse a set of rules.