In recent years, nursing education has grown and progressed a lot to train nurses with competence and professional qualifications (Aghoozi, 2020). One of the most important factors affecting the education of competent nurses is the quality of their clinical education. Since nursing is a specialized, clinical-based profession, clinical education is considered to be at its core. Moreover, nursing instructors can play an effective role in training competent nurses and clinical learning. Nursing instructors must have the necessary competence and qualifications to perform this role. As a result, nursing researchers have shown an increased interest in the effect of the qualification and competency of clinical instructors of nursing on their educational quality (Kermansaravi et al., 2015).

Competence refers to a set of knowledge, attitude, skill and other related personal characteristics that affect a main part of the occupation and correlate with its performance. Moreover, competence can be assessed according to fully accepted standards and can also be developed and improved through retraining and experience (Aghoozi, 2020, Jadidi et al., 2022). Yulian believes that a competent clinical instructor is a person who can perform their professional responsibilities well, such as teaching performance skills, interpersonal communication skills and professional ethics (Ullian et al., 1994). In addition, according to a study performed by Davis, clinical instructors are the people who provide the highest educational quality for the development of nurses in terms of professional ethics and educational abilities (Davis et al., 2005).

Wang et al. believe that a nursing instructor is responsible for guiding nursing students to play an effective professional role; therefore, it is expected that the instructors are experts, efficient and eager to perform research on clinical training (Wang et al., 2019). Shoghi believes that clinical instructors of nursing should have more than 10–15 years of experience teaching theoretical subjects to be able to transfer their experiences to students in the hospital (Shoghi et al., 2019). Furthermore, results of previous studies have shown that the damage from low-quality theoretical teaching is far less than that of low-quality clinical teaching. Therefore, it is essential to use experienced instructors for clinical training. Findings of a study performed by Joibari et al. showed that the performance of the instructor is one of the important determinants of effective clinical training. In another study, specialized and clinical educator competencies have been reported as the most important characteristics of a clinical instructor (Pinilla et al., 2021).

Educational management abilities and good ethics are among the characteristics of a clinical instructor and the educational role and specialized qualifications of the instructor are more important than their characteristics and communication. Therefore, an effective clinical instructor is expected to have professional qualifications, including interest in patient care, sufficient professional knowledge and demonstration and description of new nursing techniques (Farzi et al., 2018). In addition, in terms of the ability to teach, they should match their educational activities with the learning goals, inform the students of their duties and responsibilities clearly, make the students think more and encourage them to learn independently, be honest with the students in the clinical environment, provide appropriate feedback to improve the students and solve the problems of the patients with the participation of the students (Taylor et al., 2020).

According to the above-mentioned factors, the clinical educator competencies are one of the important factors that affect the quality of education of nursing students. Also, nursing schools and training centers need a valid tool to evaluate the competency process of clinical education instructors. However, there is no suitable instrument that can measure different aspects of this competence. Therefore, this study aimed to develop and validate a self-assessment instrument for clinical educator competencies in nursing schools.