Education
Today’s health care environment is undergoing significant changes due to complex patient’s needs, chronic health conditions, and technological innovations. Educating nurses within the 21st century requires a creative integration of knowledge, skill set, and caring within an increasingly complex healthcare system (Institute of Medicine [IOM], 2010). Nursing education is heavily laden with continuous content increases to be covered within the curriculum (Devereaux-Melillo, Dowling, Abdallah, Findeisen, & Knight, 2013). The need to examine curricular transformation is imperative in order to manage content saturation, and abate the separation of the classroom and clinical teaching. This paper will outline the following processes: (a) the development of a concept-based curricular plan for a baccalaureate program, (b) the impact of a concept-cased curriculum (CBC) on the faculty, students, finances, community of interests, accreditation, and (c) examples of the integration of competencies.
Development of Concept-Based Curricular Plan
Nursing faculty are challenged with curriculum, for they are presenting an astronomical amount of material to “cover the content”. According to Duncan and Schulz (2015) nurses practice conceptually on a daily basis by focusing on the patient needs, regardless of the medical diagnoses assigned. In order to practice conceptually, nurses must think conceptually by grouping important facts into concepts that can then be transferred from one clinical situation to another (Benner, Sutphen, Leonard, & Day, 2010). A CBC provides an opportunity for students to transfer the understanding of concepts across multiple areas, make connections to current, and future learning experiences, and underlying issues in complex situations.
Needs assessment within the plan. Curriculum development originates at the level of the university’s