CHARACTERISTICS OF PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL COMPETENCE OF NURSES

The article substantiates an important value of an appropriate professional-personal competence of nurses at the therapeutic department for their effective practical work. The basis for theoretical study is the definition of the notion “competence” suggested by the International Board of Standards for Training, Performance and Instruction (IBSTPI) as an ability to carry out qualified activity, to perform tasks or duties. At the same time, competence is considered as a phenomenon that contains a set of knowledge, skills and attitude, that allow a person to effectively perform certain functions directed to achieve the standards in professional field or activity. Objective: to find the major characteristics of communicative, personal-behavioral and motivational components of the professional-personal competence of nurses at the therapeutic department on the basis of a comprehensive examination, and set the “targets” for their purposeful development and correction. The follow-ing psychodiagnostic methods, tests and scales were used to achieve the aim: “Sociability” test by V.F. Riakhov-skyi, “Diagnostics of the level of communicative culture development” test by S.V. Znamenska, “Diagnostics of emotional barriers in interpersonal communication” method by V.V. Boiko, “Diagnostics of empathetic abili-ties level” method by V.V. Boiko, Arousability аnd Op-timism Scale (AOS) by Schuller I.S. , Comunian A L adapted by N. Vodopyanova and M. Schtein, “Motivation to choose medical profession” method modified by А.А.Vasylkova, and “Self-concept as a professional” questionnaire by A.S. Borysiuk. The results were processed by means of the program STATISTICA 12.6. It was found that nurses demonstrate high so-ciability but an average level of communicable culture; expressed emotional “barriers” in communication such as unwillingness to become close to people, undeveloped emotions, inability to control emotions; reduced empa-thetic ability; at the same time high optimism and activi-ty, prevailing altruistic reasons to choose medical profes-sion («ability to take care of health of relatives», «desire to relieve sufferings of seriously ill, elderly people»). The elements of professional-personal competence of a nurse, the most “loaded” by correlating interrelations are found. They may be estimated as key points for nurses at the therapeutic department: a reason to choose medical profession as “opportunity to take care of their own health”, level of sociability/communicability, optimism, uncertainty as a professional, empathetic abilities. Perspective tasks in the development of profes-sional-personal competence are determined. All the nurs-es at the therapeutic department, especially those working with patients suffering from arterial hypertension, are required to increase their communicative culture as a key element of their professional-personal competence through the development of emotional competence and overcoming emotional barriers in communication. The helpful means for many nurses in overcoming uncertainty as a professional, development of self-esteem and self-consistency can be their active involvement into devel-opment and introduction of corporate programs to main-tain personal health, scientific-research, preventive, edu-cational projects. Optimism and altruistic reasons to choose medical profession can be a resource for the de-velopment of professional-personal competence of nurses at the therapeutic department.