Postgraduate education pathways, regulation and professional development in critical care nursing across Europe: a scoping review

This project is a scoping review examining postgraduate education pathways, regulation, and professional development in critical care nursing across Europe. Critical care nursing requires advanced clinical competencies whose acquisition depends on postgraduate education, and international evidence links the qualification level of critical care nurses to patient safety and quality of care. However, the ways in which this advanced education is structured, regulated, financed, and formally recognised vary substantially across European countries, and no existing synthesis has examined training pathways, accreditation, professional recognition, funding, and workforce integration across Europe as an integrated whole. Southern and Mediterranean European countries — including Spain, which has no officially recognised critical care nursing speciality — remain systematically underrepresented in the existing literature. The review aims to map and synthesise the available evidence, identifying patterns, advances, knowledge gaps, and implications for practice, training policy, and future research. It is guided by the methodological framework of Arksey and O'Malley, as updated by Levac et al. and refined by the Joanna Briggs Institute, and reported in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR checklist. The review question is formulated in PCC format (Population: nurses in adult critical care/intensive care units; Concept: postgraduate education and professional development models; Context: the 46 Council of Europe member states, from January 2000 onwards). Six bibliographic databases and a systematic two-tier grey-literature search are used, with findings organised through the PAGER framework and synthesised thematically. The expected outcome is the first integrated, comparative overview of postgraduate critical care nursing education in Europe, providing an evidence base directly relevant to the ongoing debate on the potential creation of a formal critical care nursing speciality in Spain and other European countries. This scoping review constitutes Phase I of a doctoral mixed-methods project, whose findings will inform subsequent empirical phases.