Tag: supplemental nursing education

Improving Nursing Education

Health care today is continually facing different challenges as the need for improvement in technology, effective approach and quality health care professional increases. As the American population increases and the number of senior citizen swells, the presence of nurses in hospitals and other health care facilities is in demand.

There is a shift in the country’s health care needs which is now more related to chronic conditions like hypertension, arthritis, cardiovascular disease and diabetes as well as mental health conditions. This is due to the increasing aging population and spread of obesity in the country. Though it is known that chronic diseases are predominant today, our health care system is designed in favor of acute illnesses and injuries.

This shows that there is a need to make a change in nursing education. Nurses in the 20th century are educated in a different approach and the teachings and lessons are more into caring acute illnesses as well as injuries. Though it is still vital, it won’t be enough in the current health situation of the country. The patient health needs are more complex today than it was before; therefore nurses must acquire a more advanced and focused education.

Nurses today must acquire leadership qualities, evidence-based practice, research experience, improved teamwork and collaboration abilities as well as competency in particular areas like geriatrics and community and public health. Due to the development of health care technologies, nurses are expected to master technological tools and apparatuses as well as be prepared for expanding roles. That is why nurses are required to get higher levels of education. They must be educated in new ways and approaches that best suit the health care situation today. New and emerging competencies in quality improvement, decision making and team leadership must be included in nursing education.

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.

Nursing Education Diversity

When you think of a nursing professional, what exactly is the first image that comes to mind? Chances are, you think of a woman and for valid reasons. Many professional nurses in the U.S. are white females. In fact, only about 6 % of nursing staff are men and, considering men make up approximately half of the population and minorities are 30 %, there’s a major difference in the career.

That difference is shown in equal measure in nursing educational institutions, both in the student population and staff. Experts claim improving the diversity in nursing education will improve nursing care by developing more culturally delicate nursing care employees with improved interaction abilities, reduced tendencies and generalizations and fewer inequities, as well as increasing the variety of the nursing education faculty.

At a time when the healthcare system is faced with a nursing shortage caused at least partly by a lack of nursing teachers, some claim men and minorities signify a low competition resource for hiring new teachers. They believe that by developing new opportunities to entice typically underrepresented communities to the field, we can both fix the lack and create a considerable improvement to our healthcare delivery program. While minorities have made great progress in other typically white-dominated areas and ladies have done the same in typically men areas, nursing is one area where diversity projects seem to have been worthless.

In the case of men, much of the resistance to nursing as a career comes from a social understanding of nursing being a “female” career. Men say that while they enjoy the care giving aspects of the job, it’s difficult when others ask questions or make comments deriding their career choice. For example, male nurses report being asked why they did not choose to become physicians, with the connotation that they did not earn adequate grades or were too lazy to become physicians. In addition, men say that feeling left out of the career, with most training and expert development materials making reference to nurses as “she” and a female-centric approach to teaching and training.

Nursing Education Trends

Health care is changing quickly. It’s impacted by a number of different things, from overall expenses, to government oversight, towards the changing demographics of society, towards the advances in scientific analysis. And every one of these changes will modify the trends and styles in nursing education, too. Yet, another apparent pattern is using computers. Using fraxel treatments has elevated use of healthcare information and it has reduced how long it requires getting accessibility to the information. All this has enhanced the care and brought higher end results.

Another major pattern is using the electronic permanent healthcare record, which replaces the traditional paper documentation. Customers are going to be a lot more educated too due to internet connection. And more healthcare products or services are going to be shipped electronically. Nurses these days will have to be experienced within the use of computers. Nursing education may involve more online learning, making it simpler for nursing staff to carry on their professional education. Computers allows student nursing staff to imitate healthcare conditions electronically, to assist them to learn. Due to globalization, nursing education will need to deal with the problem from the spread of illness across national boundaries and deal with emerging illness risks all over the world.

Nursing education will also have to deal with the changing economy in health care. Nurses must have an awareness of techniques to look after sufferers with techniques that improve quality, deal with the complexity of care, and achieve this in an inexpensive way. As expenses increase, state and federal rules will end up much more of an issue in health care. Together with the management, there will also be trends toward moving to less costly techniques to deliver health care, and to apply market forces to help keep expenses low. Additionally, there is a pattern in healthcare education to include more healthcare science and analysis that are playing much greater tasks in healthcare practice. Nursing study is supplying a technological model for health care. These researches handle how patient behavior affects health, how you can manage symptoms of sickness, helping sufferers as well as their families deal with sickness and its treatment.

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.

NLN and Nursing Education

Two recent NLN documents address the NLN’s commitment to improving the science of nursing education and nursing education research while maintaining a focus on patient-centered care and safe medical practice. “For three decades, the NLN has devoted programming and resources to develop a powerful community of nurse educator scholars that complement the growth and improvement of programs that prepare clinical nurse researchers,” said NLN president Judith Halstead, PhD, RN, FAAN, ANEF. “We are proud of that legacy. The new ‘NLN Vision: Transforming Research in Nursing Education’ and ‘Priorities for Research in Nursing Education’ develop on our mission to promote quality in medical knowledge to develop a powerful and diverse workforce to relocate the nation’s health.”

As stated in the NLN Vision: “The new times for medical and wellness care engendered by wellness care change require partnerships, collaboration, and systems integration. The NLN’s ‘Priorities for Research in Nursing Education’ call for building linkages between practice and education; improving the science of nursing education through the growth of more rigorous and robust analysis designs and evaluation protocols; determining and developing effective emerging technologies to transform pedagogical approaches; and creating leadership possibilities for faculty and nursing education research scholars.”

“The research main concerns were developed in consultation with nursing management in practice and education who came together at the behest of the NLN to develop an experienced strategy for guiding research projects in the years ahead,” added NLN CEO Beverly Malone, PhD, RN, FAAN. “With the help of colleagues, the NLN continues to define and improve the research necessary to relocate quality in nursing education.” Dedicated to quality in nursing, the National League for Nursing is the premier organization for nursing faculty and management in nursing education. The NLN offers faculty growth, networking possibilities, testing services, nursing research grants, and public policy projects to its 37,000 individual and more than 1,200 institutional members who represent nursing teaching programs across the variety of higher education.

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.

Nursing Education in the U.S.

Nursing education in the United States has gone through remarkable changes these days. Those providing treatment and coaching in educational institutions of nursing are better prepared educationally than ever before, the science that underlies our practice is increasingly being built through scholarly initiatives of medical professionals, and collaborative relationships between medical professionals and other medical treatment workers continue to progress. In addition, the opportunities for medical professionals to effect the wellness of people through their tasks as medical professionals, doctors, nurses, home treatment doctors, supervisors and staff, wellness teachers, acute and long term treatment doctors, and staff are growing considerably.

In order to prepare medical professionals for beginning and innovative levels of practice, academic applications also have gone through remarkable changes these days. Many curricula are innovative and entertaining, rather than firm and proscriptive. Knowledge is more learner-focused than teacher-centered. Medical encounters for learners indicate a greater focus on community-based treatment, health marketing, disease avoidance, family participation, and self-care. And the incorporation of technology and the use of online techniques are more obvious in nursing teaching applications.

In academic programs, there is an increased focus on saving system results and indicating that graduate students do, indeed, have the individual treatment, thinking, and interaction capabilities needed to function in our complicated, constantly-changing, uncertain, unforeseen, crazy medical treatment market. Finally, nursing teachers are acknowledging that there is an art and a technology to coaching nursing – just as there is an art and a technology to exercising nursing – and they are seeking planning in program development and assessment, creative teaching/learning strategies, student and system assessment, and other areas that supplement their medical expertise and expertise.

Supplemental Education – The Benefits of Online Tutoring For Nurses

Technology has been very difficult to monitor. It has improved so much in so little time that we sometimes forget the convenience that it offers us. Face to face meetings are no longer required. For supplemental education, this means no more meeting educators you are not completely fond of or going to uncomfortable classrooms. Both parties, the tutor and student, can just stay in their own homes or offices, and agree to communicate online instead. And when one is preparing for an exam like the NCLEX and/or Clinical Exam Prep you cannot afford not to study and get any help that you can.

Despite all of the benefits of online tutoring, there are many who are hesitant to apply for these courses. There are certain misconceptions that need to be cleared up.

1. Working with computers

Some students think that online tutoring feels awkward because all they can do is read. This isn’t the case. With online tutoring, you are still working with a person when you prefer. While there are many courses that simply offer resources, should you feel the need of companionship that you are used to, there are many online programs that offer this.

2. Convenience versus discipline

With online classes, you can get to choose your most convenient time. When you’re striving to be a RN, this benefit is not always available. Traditional classes are scheduled, and once you miss it, you have to wait for the next one. With an online program, this hassle is eliminated. If you are currently employed and taking RN classes as well, time is not one of your luxuries. Instead of traveling to a location during a specific time to physically be present, you can just log into your PC or laptop at the time you scheduled, and watch the live video classes or the recorded link.

The reason for the hesitation is because it requires more self-discipline than the traditional classroom. You can easily miss it if you decide to do so. If you’re committed to become an RN though, this should not be a problem.

If you’re looking for supplemental nursing education, do not cross out online programs as your option. You may get better education, at a lower price and in a more comfortable location.