‍Clinical Supervision System: A Method for Improving Educational Performance of Nursing Personnel

Introduction: Employing supervision methods which focuses on educational aspects may increase the effectiveness of nursing personnel's educational activities, especially patient education. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of clinical supervision on the effectiveness of nurses' educational performance. Methods: This quasi-experimental study was conducted using static groups' comparison in which the control and experiment groups were compared by a post-test. Study samples included 72 patients who were matched and assigned into two distinct groups. Clinical supervision system was implemented through three steps in 3 wards of Samen-al-Aemme hospital in Mashhad for 6 months. The data gathering tool included patient information sheet, patient satisfaction from nurses' educational practice and rating scale of self-care knowledge and practice of patients. Data was gathered through interview and observation methods and analyzed by SPSS software. Results: The mean scores of self-care knowledge and practice of the patients were 30.6 and 57.1 out of 100, in the control and experiment groups, respectively. The mean score of patients' satisfaction from nurses' educational practice was 19.6 in the control group and 20.9 in the experiment group, out of 24. So that, independent t-test showed a significant difference between these two groups. Conclusion: Implementing clinical supervision system through observation, feedback, discussion, and investigation, may develop nurses' knowledge and professional skills in patient education. Therefore, this supervision method could be regarded as an effective model for in-service education. More studies are required in order to investigate the effect of this model on other aspects of nurses' practice.