Gut Check | Monday, January 9, 2017

The Only Four Questions You Need to Assess Competency

Donna Wright, MS, RN

Donna Wright, MS, RN, has created a system to ensure your team has kept afloat in the sea of change in competencies. Her interactive worksheet helps any and all specialties be able to pinpoint exactly where their competencies lie, and which competencies need improvement.

“When you have a system that can keep you on the pulse of change, then you’ve cornered the market on what your competencies need to be,” Donna says.

This worksheet is a questions-based system that your team can discuss. Sounds fairly simple, right? What’s more, it’s only four questions — and those questions never change.

The four questions you should be asking are:

1. What’s new?

2. What’s changing?

3. What’s high-risk?

4. What’s problematic?

“List everything out, and [the next steps is a] system where you prioritize and figure out if anything falls in more than one box,” Donna explains. “If it’s new and has high-risk components to it, then it’s likely to be a competency; if it’s problematic and it’s changing, it’s likely to be a competency.”

According to Wright, this begins to become an algorithm that helps you figure out exactly what your competencies should be. She adds, “I can sit down with any competency anywhere in the world and ask those four questions with the two-tiered process of brainstorming with prioritization second, and we can find out exactly what our competencies should be for this time period.”