How Nurses in Hospital in Vietnam Learn to Improve their Own Nursing Competency: An Ethnographic Study

Background: Competency affects several aspects of the quality of nursing care and has a significant contribution to the patient outcomes. There exists little up to date information concerning nursing profession as well as how nurses employing in clinical settings in Vietnam learn to improve their own competencies. Objectives: To investigate the ways Vietnamese nurses practicing in clinical settings have learned to improve their own competencies. Methods: A qualitative study, ethnographic method, comprised of the participant-observation, in-depth interview, and focus group discussion with multidisciplinary groups of nurses employing in Cho Ray Hospital, Vietnam, managers/administrators, nurse teachers, other health care personnel which derived from purposeful sampling technique. Content analysis was used to analyze the data. Findings: The two ways of learning in order to develop competencies among nurses were identified by the participants through the data collection in this study, including formal and informal learning. Nurses have received their formal training in nursing education programs in nursing schools after graduation to upgrade their nursing professional level was identified as formal learning. However, in the situation of nursing education in Vietnam, there has been rare of formal nursing education programs in bachelor level and higher, informal learning included continuing nursing education, learning from working experience, learning from daily reflective process, and coaching and mentoring was a vital learning strategy for nurses to apply in order to enhance their competencies. Conclusion: The findings from this study provide valuable information and understanding of the ways Vietnamese nurses working in hospital context have learned to improve individual competencies. It would assist to establish an effectively and appropriately strategy in an effort of enhancing nursing competency among nurses in Vietnam.