Quality nursing education demands nurse educators to be competent in their clinical and teaching skills, as they are responsible for the overall management of clinical teaching and assessment (Gaberson & Oermann, 2021; WHO, 2022b). Nurse educators must also maintain and enhance their competencies to adequately respond to changes such as new pandemic infections, environmental risks like climate change, the rising number of chronic diseases as a result of aging populations, and technological advancement (Takase et al., 2020). The World Health Organization (WHO) developed eight core competencies of an effective nurse educator, including competence in nursing practice. (WHO, 2022b). Despite this global understanding, the clinical competence of educators has not been highlighted at country level (Leighton et al., 2022). As they are teaching the future nurses, continuous effort is needed to ensure that educators are up-to-date and have retained the required clinical competence (Salminen et al., 2021). This should be started with a thorough understanding of competency levels and factors affecting them.

Clinical skill can be assessed through various methods, with the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) being one popular method (Piumatti et al., 2021). The OSCE is a reliable and valid method for assessing clinical competence and is suitable for assessing competence in various fields of nursing specialization (Kolivand et al., 2020a; Solà-Pola et al., 2020).

There are multiple factors that prompted the authors to assess Ethiopian nurse educators’ clinical competence. Firstly, there is an increasing report that the quality of nursing education has declined. The performance of nursing students in the Ethiopian national licensing examination is low, with a median score of 37.3% and a pass rate of 40.5% (MOH, 2020). A task analysis study found that a large proportion of nurses reported low capability in emergency nursing and maternal and child health care (Hart et al., 2018). A recent observational study reported that competence of practicing nurses in Ethiopia is low and they are less motivated to give self-initiated nursing care (Weldetsadik et al., 2020). Nurse educators also reported low confidence in their clinical skills that prevented them from direct participation in clinical teaching (Asegid et al., 2023).

Secondly, although the effectiveness of nurse educators has an impact on the quality of nursing education, there are important gaps in the recruitment of nurse educators and ensuring the maintenance of their clinical competence. A significant proportion of nurse educators in Ethiopia assume the educator role immediately after graduation without clinical work experience (Asegid et al., 2023). In addition, most nursing faculty do not maintain clinical practice, resulting in the erosion of their clinical skills (Asegid et al., 2023). Dejene and his colleagues have also reported that nursing instructors don't have adequate opportunities to keep up-to-date and receive feedback on their teaching and clinical skills (Dejene et al., 2022). Therefore, this study aimed to determine nurse educators’ clinical competence through direct observation of skill performance. The findings of this study will help ministries of education and health to develop faculty recruitment and development policies that ensure clinical competence of nurse educators. Moreover, it will inform education institutions to support continuing professional development of nurse educators.