Creating a new education paradigm to prepare nurses for the 21st Century

Abstract

Nurse educators are accountable to keep baccalaureate education responsive to the ever changing healthcare delivery environment. The changing context of healthcare delivery requires focusing on population health and social determinants, providing interprofessional, team-based care, advancing innovation, and preparing practice ready baccalaureate nursing graduates. To be practice ready, nursing graduates must be agile and think and reason on their feet due to increasing care complexity beyond the hospital walls, changing care needs of individuals and families, advancing technology, shifting settings of care delivery, and managing multiple transitions. The purpose of this paper is to consider these healthcare changes and share a new baccalaureate nursing curriculum that radically shifts the paradigm from caring for patients to caring for people, and transforms from a diseased-based, acute care focused curriculum to one promoting a culture of health and multiple new and emerging roles of registered nurses.