Tag: nursing education programs

Can Online Education Be The Solution To Addressing The Nursing Shortage?

The nursing shortage is a significant challenge facing the healthcare industry today. According to the National Library of Medicine, this problem has complex roots, including a need for more potential educators, high turnover rates, and an uneven distribution of nurses.

 

However, the issue is not new and has been a concern for years. The demand for registered nurses has consistently outpaced the supply, as reported by U.S. News, and this gap has only grown wider due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics projects a staggering 203,200 job openings for registered nurses through 2031. We urgently need a solution to train and prepare new nurses to meet this demand.

 

The Role of Online Education

One promising solution to address the nursing shortage is using an online education platform that is more innovative than traditional solutions. This innovative approach offers an accelerated and accredited nursing degree program that provides flexibility and addresses the issues of cost and time constraints.

 

Revolutionizing Nursing Education

Online EdTech companies are revolutionizing how we approach college education. Their cutting-edge platform allows students to start courses at their convenience and complete them in weeks, all at a fraction of the cost compared to the national average tuition fees.

 

Overcoming Traditional Barriers

Traditional four-year bachelor’s degree programs at colleges or universities often present formidable obstacles to aspiring registered nurses. Many students face rejection from nursing programs, prolonged on-campus commitments, high tuition fees, inflexible schedules, curriculum challenges, and a sense of isolation. The right online education program overcomes these barriers.

 

Affordable and Accessible Education

One of the primary obstacles to becoming a registered nurse is the high cost of education. However, the more innovative online education programs and platforms offer 100% online courses, allowing students to maintain a flexible lifestyle while reducing costs to half the national tuition average. Moreover, these courses are taught by experienced Master’s and PhD instructors, ensuring the quality of education.

 

Endorsement and Accreditation

The recommendation of its courses, such as the American Council on Education, sets the right online education program apart. Furthermore, they facilitate the transfer of students to partner universities, which then confer accredited university degrees upon qualifying students. The right online program will also work with several university partners, giving students various options to earn a respected and accredited nursing degree.

 

Bridging the Gender Gap

According to Forbes, women in nursing roles often earn higher salaries than their male counterparts. For example, women make 3% more than men as vocational nurses. Therefore, online education programs that use a more advanced platform particularly benefit young people and women.

 

The Solution Summarized

The shortage of nurses is a long-standing challenge exacerbated by various factors. The solution is not just an online nursing education program but an online nursing education program that uses an innovative platform that differentiates itself from others in accessibility, affordability, and flexibility. By embracing such a solution, we can work towards resolving this critical issue and ensuring a steady supply of qualified nurses in the healthcare industry.

 

Written By:  Justin Hart

The Value of Simulation in Nursing Education

nursing_educationTechnology performs a significant part in every profession. It has surpassed all the dimensions of the healthcare field too. There is an obvious advancement in the technologies used in hospital configurations as well as education settings. Starting from the evaluation of sufferers, to the treatment methods, a variety of equipment has taken over the part of nurses. For example, EMR has replaced the manual documentation of patient care. The EMR was incorporated into the medical work-flow to maintain right documentation of patient details and care and to ensure safe, quality care to the patients. Just like the clinical setting, technologies are advancing in the area of nursing education as well. The introduction of simulators in nursing has bridged the gap between classroom education and medical practice.

What is simulator and what role does it play in the nursing education? It is the imitation or duplication of a scenario or an event that one would deal with in real life (Sasser, 2011). Simulation has been used in the health care field for quite some time now. It has undergone a lot of changes from the first life sized manikin popularly known as Mrs. Chase, to the high fidelity full body simulators. A nurse gains information through academic research, realistic sessions, case research, and conferences and so on Nurses learn theory in school and get their realistic exposure in the clinical settings. In many cases, learners are unable to think critically and are anxious while providing care to the sufferers. Moreover, their level of confidence is pretty low and that affects their overall performance. Simulation plays a central part in today’s nursing education.

Going back to early 20th century, nursing learners practiced their abilities on hypodermic injection pads, IM hypodermic injection on oranges and so on. After few decades, the life size manikin Mrs. Chase took over the nursing skill area and she became more popular nationwide, as well as globally. Over the decades, the simulators experienced significant changes and now, it plays an important part in improving the nurses’ actual skills. Standardized sufferers are well-trained individuals who mimic a part so that the nursing learners can practice their skills of evaluation and enhance their interaction abilities. High fidelity manikins are used in the educational set ups to enable learners to practice and enhance advanced medical skills. These are trainer driven and allow learners to practice their nursing, critical thinking, decision making and interaction abilities in a given patient scenario. Simulation is helpful in many ways. It enhances essential medical abilities like crucial considering, decision-making and evaluation and permits them to handle challenging situations in a secure and controlled environment. This in turn enhances the student’s confidence in dealing with an identical scenario in the near future. In addition, nursing learners are allowed to get some things wrong in a safe scenario.

A Collaborative Model of Nursing Education

A new effort designed to ease the conversion between associate and baccalaureate degree nursing programs started out to its first class of learners this summer. Based at the School of Nursing at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), the program enables learners with associate degrees in nursing (ADN) to earn baccalaureate degrees in nursing (BSN) in 12 months. Supporters of the program see this as a big improvement over the typical ADN-to-BSN conversion, which can take learners two years to complete and often includes repetitive training because of unreliable curricula across nursing educational institutions. It will also enhance diversity in the nursing employees and help develop more wellness professional management, followers said.

“The idea is that learners will get their BSN in a year with no repeating of courses,” said Mary Dickow, MPA, state-wide director of the California Action Coalition, a group of wellness professional management and nurse champions who will work to enhance nursing and nursing care in situations by changing the nursing career. The California Action Coalition is a part of the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, a national campaign supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and AARP that is attempting to convert health care through nursing.

The CSULA programs draws from a white paper on nursing education upgrade, called the California Collaborative Model for Nursing Education (CCMNE), which was released in 2008 by the California Institute for Nursing & Health Care. The model set out in the white paper and now implemented at CSULA, has been duplicated in other configurations around the state.

The program’s overall goal is to create a more highly knowledgeable nursing workforce, which is needed to ensure there is an adequate supply of nursing staff and to enhance the quality of care. Research has shown that BSN-prepared nursing staff provides more secure care, in part because of their background in pathophysiology and because of their understanding of disease procedures, Judson said. Equipped with this type of nursing education, many companies in the region are now demanding that new nursing staff hold bachelor’s degree or higher, leaving ADN-prepared nursing staff with less job opportunities. This program is a life line that allows many to continue their nursing careers.

Barriers of Nursing Education

The demand for nursing staff across North Carolina is growing considerably. But so are the limitations preventing access to the right nursing education. More nursing centers require four-year degrees for RNs beyond the minimum associate’s degree. But higher education programs are turning away qualified candidates for lack of space. It’s a nursing shortage with no simple solutions. And just over the skyline, the healthcare industry can see a trend of as many as 32 million recently insured Americans who will get into the system on Jan. 1, 2014, as part of the national Affordable Care Act.

Now, universities and nursing centers are working together to fix the problem for themselves. Health care is changing in many ways. In the future, nursing centers will be the last resort for the most seriously ill people. Nurses will cure a variety of diseases, help manage such serious problems as diabetes and even recommend medicines for many conditions. Greensboro’s Cone Health utilizes about 3,000 nursing staff across five nursing centers. And based on revenues or new jobs, it can hire hundreds of nursing staff every year. Some 65% of the nursing staff now at Cone has four-year higher education degrees, bachelors of science in nursing. Cone wishes to boost that to at least 80% by 2020, under suggestions from the national Institute of Medicine.

Cone has mentioned a decrease of death rates after surgery for sufferers handled by nursing staff with bachelor’s degrees and even individual fulfillment ratings are higher, said the center’s top health professional, Theresa Brodrick, RN, Ph.D., executive vice president and primary nursing official for Cone Health. But getting that nursing education is not simple. Students have two routes to become certified nurses: They can start out in a four-year program without a nursing certificate or they can get into an associate’s level system at a community college. Both are extremely competitive. In some cases only 50% of candidates are accepted. Another program that allows a nurse to earn a bachelor’s degree may provide more nursing staff with bachelor’s degrees.

Nursing Education to Meet Health Care Needs

The changes proposed by health care reform have the potential to significantly alter the surroundings in which the medical staff and other medical professionals will practice. The emerging emphasis on primary care, transition care, and accountable care organizations underscores a fundamental shift in how the US wellness care delivery program is envisioned to function later on. This upcoming wellness care atmosphere is very different from the one that many of us in academia currently prepare our learners to exercise in, i.e., an atmosphere that has been predominately focused on preparing learners for practice in the acute care setting. The IOM’s Future for Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health (2011) clearly identifies changes that need to occur in nursing education and learning if we hope to prepare the nurses with the competencies and skills required to practice in a redesigned wellness care program.

What is the part of nursing education and learning in realizing a transformed wellness care system? The part can be a significant one, but only if we are willing to re-examine our current nursing education and learning designs. To produce the nurses prepared to practice in reformed wellness care environments, we can no longer educate our future nurses using the traditional academic methods that we have long embraced.

There exists no substantive proof to suggest that our traditional means of clinical education and learning in nursing and other wellness professions are particularly effective in creating clinical reasoning, so it is an opportune time to pay attention to our academic methods and create new learning paradigms that are grounded in proof. I believe we need to focus on four priority areas in order to achieve meaningful transformation in our nursing education and learning models: building faculty capacity; designing new structures of clinical education; creating innovative designs of academic/practice collaboration; and advancing the science of nursing education and learning through research.

Choosing the Right Nursing Education

The medical subject is becoming very demanding lately particularly due to improvement in the amount of new and additional critical illnesses which may be appearing every day. These conditions require superior techniques of therapy and additional licensed professionals who understand ways to use the latest treatment technologies. Nursing is among the areas in medicine that demand professionalism. This subject serves a vital goal inside the delivery of quality health care services all across the globe. So, if you’re likely to become a knowledgeable nurse, you have to endure enough training by professionals. That’s why it’s of great importance and significance that you should choose the very best nursing education. Here are the things you need to look out for when searching for the right nursing education:

Program: An essential query that you ought to request every time you are looking for the right nursing education is: What programs will it offer? Keep in mind, nursing is very demanding and when you aren’t getting sufficient training, you’ll have a difficult time delivering companies to patients.

Credibility: The credibility of the training that you simply choose may also be vital. Lately, there’ve emerged a number of low class schools supplying low quality training in medical care. The problem with centers is they are run by those who only want to make money. This furthermore implies that the teachers in these facilities aren’t well targeted up if this involves information and tools. Thus, you might only rely on an average kind of training from such centers. It’s subsequently essential to do your homework around the repute of the establishment that you simply plan to join sooner than you are making any last decision. It’s also best to examine the accreditation of the institution.

Online programs: Using the internet, life is becoming easy and interesting. It’s now possible for individuals to complete their studies online without having the need to go through the inconveniences that include the routine of attending courses daily. It has indeed assisted university students who’re already trying to proceed with their research without having to stifle their tight agendas.

Choosing an Online Nursing School

Distance learning is really a convenient method of getting your nursing education, particularly if you’re associated with other obligations for example work and family. If you’re planning to obtain a nursing degree (or advanced degree), however, make an intensive self-assessment to find out if you possess the discipline to achieve success and finish it. Online education or distance learning isn’t for everybody, obviously. It takes lots of discipline and independence. Additionally, it suits some personas and learning styles a lot more than others. Once you’ve determined that distance learning is perfect for you, the next phase is selecting the best online school or provider. You need to be careful about selecting a trusted distance learning provider since there are some companies that are less reputable and just like to sell product without any support.

When looking for a distance learning program, the very first factor you need to check is if the credits will earn you an accreditation college degree. Not only since it states within the website that it’s “accredited” that you ought to already trust this program. It ought to be accredited with a legitimate and recognized accrediting organization. The program’s or school’s accrediting agency should come in the database from the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. You will find lots of fake agencies growing online and when you get a diploma from these schools with fake accreditation, your qualifications won’t be any good for employment positioning.

The health care sector is strictly controlled by national and state certification boards. If you want to pursue a web-based nursing education or advanced degree from a certain provider, make sure that the programs provided by the provider meet industry standards, especially in the state where you want to work. Take a look at the state’s certification needs for RNs and see if the provider has produced “graduates” who passed the certification exams and became RNs. Only buy instruction which will translate to some career transition. Choosing the right distance learning program is very important because it will become the foundation of the health care career that you want to pursue.

Cultural Competence in Nursing Education

A lot of people believe that it is important to become culturally aware, sensitive to our surrounding, and competent in a particular field of study. Sometimes, when I travel, I usually think about the diversity I see within our major metropolitan areas to pass time on my trip. But even just in our small cities and rural towns, where there’s a seeming insufficient diversity, most people in America are a combination of ethnic skills, an expression from the melting pot that so characterizes our predominant culture. Within the era of genetic mapping, it is necessary for all of us to understand our roots. But how about individuals that are not like us? That is why it is vital to sometimes immerse in a culture which was totally unfamiliar when it comes to ethnicity, cultural mores, and religious activities. It is amazing how strange it feels not to stay in most, to become not aware on how to go about activities, communications, and traditions.

That has brought to ideas about a person entering a healthcare facility for the first time. Within our hospitals, there exists a special, different culture, a distinctive pattern of communication and unspoken rules of behavior that, the assumption is, everybody knows. Following a brief overview of our nursing education literature concerning the teaching of cultural competence in nursing and health professions educational programs (Institute of Medicine, 2003), it might be better to extend our discussions beyond what we should train as cultural competence, to maneuver beyond ethnicity and racial variations, to variations in culture which exist between patients and companies to better improve the quality of our nursing education programs. In healthcare conditions, we, the companies, would be the parents of the culture. Frequently we don’t want things to change, for the status quo feels safe, but change is inevitable, and the best thing to do is to make sure that the changes in our nursing education happens in a positive and beneficial way.