Introduction: Nursing is a global profession and competent nurses are vital for a positive outcome of a patient’s treatment. Students of nursing develop their competences for autonomous work during their study process and in that time they also gain the ability to understand and use the knowledge, to be decisive, communicative and to be able to gain knowledge independently. Purpose: Main purpose was to study nursing students’ self-evaluation of those competences by the standards of the European Federation of Nurses Associations during their undergraduate studies of nursing. Methods: We used a structured questionnaire that consisted of 18 questions, 5 of which were open type questions and the rest were closed type. The respondents were undergraduate students of the higher education study programme Nursing at the Faculty of Health Sciences in Ljubljana. Results: The questionnaire was filled in by 156 students. They gained a lot of competences from the fields of ethics, culture and values, health promotion, interpersonal communication, anatomy, nutrition and dietetics and the fundamentals of CPR. They were not as confident in their competences concerning legislation, palliative care and entrepreneurship. Discussion and conclusion: Students at the end of their studies do not feel completely competent in every field of nursing. During their studies they mostly gain a fair amount of competences, which are only the basics needed for starting their careers. The results show us which fields and competences we should focus on more in the nursing programme. On the other hand, the results also showed which set of guidelines is already effective and where we should only continue and upgrade the good work and knowledge. The goal for the next research in this field could be an ongoing evaluation of the competences that students gained at the end of each academic year.
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