BS in Nursing

The faculty is committed to nursing education grounded in the arts, sciences and humanities, meeting professional standards for nursing education and practice. Nursing is a humanistic profession that enhances the quality of life by promoting health and preventing illness through the effective delivery of coordinated health care. Nursing knowledge is advanced through thinking critically, engaging in scholarship, and applying knowledge to the delivery of nursing care.

The values of altruism, autonomy, human dignity, integrity, and social justice are the foundation for professional nursing practice. Through community collaboration graduates are prepared to assume multiple roles to impact the profession, health care systems, and communities.

The graduate of the nursing program will be able to demonstrate:

Provide health protection and promotion, risk reduction, disease prevention, illness care, rehabilitation, and end of life care to clients within a holistic framework in a variety of settings.

Rationale: Graduates will be generalists who offer a service, nursing care, within the context of the nursing process (see Critical Thinking). Includes assessment, planning, intervention, and evaluation for actual and potential health needs for clients (individuals, families, aggregates, and communities). Health is a dynamic and individual state of being that includes wellness and illness. Health Protection describes the regulatory and environmental measures used to enforce protective strategies for specified population groups. Health Promotion describes strategies designed to increase the physical, social, and emotional health, growth, and development of individuals, families, and communities. Risk Reduction is the application of selected interventions to control or reduce risk factors and minimize the incidence of associated disease and premature mortality.

Disease Prevention is behavior directed toward reducing the threat of illness, disease, or complications. Illness Care describes the care given to a client who is experiencing an illness of disease process. Rehabilitation is the process of restoring a person’s ability to achieve the maximum self-care in physical and psychological fitness after a disabling injury or illness. End of Life Care describes palliative and bereavement care for terminally ill individuals and their families.

The graduate of the nursing program will be able to demonstrate:

Synthesize knowledge, skills, and technology from the established practice and science of nursing, the biological and psychosocial sciences, and the humanities to engage in critical thinking and the nursing process in the care of clients.

Rationale: Nursing involves the evaluation and integration of theory, principles, and technology from science, using clinical skills. Critical Thinking is defined as purposeful, reflective thought process that guides mwhat to believe and do. Levels of critical thinking progress from: The discrimination of factors that influence or affect common clinical situations;
● The ability to interpret the significance of multidirectional and interrelated factors that affect clinical
decision-making;
● The ability to engage in complex clinical reasoning that leads to predictions, proactive decisions, and
influences change. Critical thinking is foundational to the nursing process, or the nursing decisionmaking process of assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation.

Develop caring relationships with clients that are sensitive to diverse personal, socio-cultural, and environmental characteristics, which encourage clients to assume primary responsibility for health care decisions, and in which the nurse functions as advocate and advisor.

Rationale: This criterion elaborates the expectation that graduates will establish caring relationships nurses in caring relationships respect and incorporate the culture, values and beliefs of clients when planning care.

This relationship implies that clients and their families have primary responsibility for their own health care decisions.

Use effective communication and information technology to communicate interpersonal and health care information.

Rationale: Communication refers to an interactive process of giving and receiving written, verbal and/or nonverbal messages which convey information, feeling, attitude, and ideas in a social context.

Enhance professional role development.

Rationale: Role development is the development of a professional identity and the enactment of functions of a professional nurse. These include nurse as provider, coordinator, and advocate of care. The graduate will be a member of a profession which actively participates at all levels within the health care system. The nursing professional influences the process of health policy formation along with its impact on nursing and the health care delivery system. All professional nurses must display characteristics of leadership and engage in leading and managing activities, either at the bedside or in other positions of responsibility within organizations and communities.

Engage in activities to promote self-awareness, self-growth, ethical accountability, and legal responsibility in the practice of nursing.

Rationale: This criterion articulates the ethical and legal accountabilities we expect of a graduate. Selfawareness means that graduates have insight into their own values, strengths, and needs; self-growth refers to the idea that graduates value ongoing learning and professional service; accountability means being responsible for ones own behavior and the consequences of that behavior; and responsibility implies that the nurse will practice according to societal expectations, professional standards of practice, and the legal parameters of licensure.

Contribute to excellence in nursing practice by identifying and critiquing research evidence and integrating it with clinical practice, client preference, cost-benefit, and existing resources.

Rationale: In the scholarship of discovery students are involved in assembling and evaluating evidence through high quality integrative reviews. The scholarship of integration involves the synthesis and critique of existing knowledge across disciplines. The scholarship of application involves developing competence in practice that is evidence-based.