Nursing and Midwifery Competency Framework
- The ability to deliver a specified professional service
- The total role functioning of a professional, which incorporates a number of elements or units of competence
- A unit of competence (a competency) is a relatively self-contained achievement and should as far as possible be complete
- A competency describes the outcome expectations of a particular work role and acts as a benchmark against which individual performance is judged (Uys 2003)
- Competence encompasses the knowledge, judgement, skills, energy, experience and motivation required to respond adequately to the demands of one’s professional responsibilities (Roach 1992; Leung et al 2016; International Confederation of Midwives, 2019)
Holistic approach to competence (Mulcahy 2000)
“…competence is a complex outcome, or, better perhaps, an event.
Competence development in its ‘richest’ sense involves a number of processes – discursive and material – which are only partially assimilable.
Rather than regarding competence as something individuals or organisations have, it might be better to regard it as something that they do”
(p 521).
