The shortage of well-educated nurses has been part of the nation’s
health care conversation, with policy leaders as well as President Obama
noting the essential role nurses play in ensuring patient safety. The
President called them “the bedrock” of health care. Now, The Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is calling for changes in how
we educate nurses, referring both to the current nursing shortage and
that nurses are ill-prepared for the profound changes in science,
technology and the nature and settings of nursing practice. Informed by
the results of three national surveys and extended site visits during a
multi-year study, the authors of Educating
Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformationrecommend essential
changes in policy, curriculum and in the way nursing programs approach
student learning.
“We believe that the enormous pressures on today’s nursing
profession—the chaotic U.S. health care system and the economic forces
that drive it, shortage in the ranks of nurses, shortage of nursing
educators, multiple pathways to the profession that discourage rather
than encourage practicing nurses to complete post licensure
degrees—threaten to compromise nurses’ ability to practice
state-of-the-art nursing and enact the profession’s core values of care
and responsibility,” the authors write.
Among the recommendations are:
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that the baccalaureate degree in nursing should be the minimal
educational level for entry into practice and that within ten years
after graduation that all nurses complete a master’s degree in nursing
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that nursing program capacities have to be expanded so that students
can complete nursing programs in a reasonable amount of time and that
the associate of nursing degree from community colleges be
re-evaluated in light of the extended amount of time most student
nurses spend in completing these nursing programs
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that coursework be tied to what actually happens in patient care
rather than in the abstract, helping students make the connection
between acquiring and using knowledge, integrating the classroom with
clinical practice
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that nurses are prepared for the myriad contexts in which they will
work, not merely a hospital setting.
“Redesigning nursing education is an urgent societal agenda," the
authors write. "The profound changes in nursing practice and health care
call for equally profound changes in the education of nurses and the
preparation of nurse educators. Unfortunately, the current climate
rewards short-term focus and cost-savings over the quality of nursing
education and patient care.”
