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by: Patricia Benner
Many schools of nursing are embarked upon transforming their nursing curriculum in response to the Carnegie National Study of Nursing Education, the IOM/Robert Woods Johnson Futures Report, the Lancet Report, The Essentials of Baccalaureate Nursing Education, and the QSEN Report on Quality and Safety Education for Nurses. These external demands are met with faculty realizing that that their curriculum may be ten or more years old and in need of revision. Where to begin?
We will focus on strategies to help in transforming a curriculum. Both the effectiveness and artfulness of a curriculum depends on identifying local knowledge and strengths and yet be relevant to diversity and global demands for nursing care. This sounds a little like the fabled mythical dessert that must be hot and cold at the same time. A local curriculum, based upon local strengths and resources that captures unique contributions of particular schools while attending to national and global demands, not to mention national and regional accreditation.
There is a theme here. Nursing Education is called upon to upgrade nursing education to meet current levels of science required for highly technical health care environments even as health care shifts to more ambulatory, community and home care. Nurses are expected to play a key role in health promotion as they also are expected to help an aging population with many chronically ill patients, and technology dependent adults and children. Again, where to begin? How to incorporate the multiple competing demands for the nurse of tomorrow?
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2 Comments
Diane Pestolesi RN, MSN, CNE
11/18/2011 at 11:52 pm —
Patricia,
First of all, thank you for your ability to articulate a process that is overwhelming to most faculty. Since getting started is always the most difficult part of designing or redesigning curriculum, we decided to adopt a, “like the laundry, it’s never done,” approach to our curriculum. We view curriculum as an evolving dynamic process. In order to facilitate the curriculum process, and to ensure that our curriculum is current and relevant we have a nursing program curriculum committee made up of faculty from various courses and levels in the program that meets twice each semester.
Through the committee, research, recommendations from various studies and requirements from accrediting bodies that pertain to curriculum are reviewed and shared on a regular basis. We have found that the dialogue that has evolved out of this process has been crucial in developing a shared vision of what learning outcomes and competencies are essential for our graduates. This process of ongoing review has been crucial in to get faculty buy in when changes or updates are identified.
The chair of the nursing curriculum committee has made it possible to capture and document “drive by” comments, thoughts from conferences, and topics for further consideration pertaining to the program curriculum. Through the evaluation of NCLEX, course and standardized test scores, with consideration of student, agency and faculty input, the program curriculum committee works tirelessly to transform the curriculum to ensure it meets our needs and is globally relevant.
Sarabeth Friedman C.N.M., M.S.N.
11/21/2011 at 4:59 pm —
This is an insightful and very helpful article on this complex subject. Thanks!