Leadership Development in Undergraduate Nursing Students: A Scoping Review

Background: Leadership is present at all levels of nursing and is essential to ensure the continuous improvement of nursing practice environments and the quality of the care provided to patients. This reality, coupled with the growing complexity of today’s health contexts, emphasises the importance of promoting the development of leadership skills in undergraduate nursing students, thus training nurses who are capable of acting as leaders and agents of change. To this end, a scoping review was carried out to map the available scientific evidence on the development of leadership in undergraduate nursing students. Methods: The scoping review was conducted according to two systematic review guidelines. The searches were conducted across a total of five databases for published studies and two databases for the unpublished/grey literature. The data extraction and analysis were performed by two reviewers, who independently screened and extracted data from the selected studies. Results: This review included 25 articles, and four thematic categories were identified—students’ perceptions of leadership; strategies to train leaders in nursing; the evaluation of leadership development; and conceptual models and curricula. The main conclusions highlight the need to reformulate existing curricula, the importance of integrating student-centred pedagogical approaches to promote leadership development, the impact that evaluating leadership development has on the whole process, contributing to the construction of an identity as a leader, and the need for it to be done in a structured and progressive way. Conclusions: The teaching of leadership should be promoted from the beginning of training, in a transversal, continuous, consistent, sustained, and articulated way, incorporating different disciplines, because only in this way will it be possible to train competent nurse leaders who are capable of acting in today’s complex and dynamic health contexts.