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BSN: Program Philosophy And Student Learning Outcomes
The JMU Nursing faculty is committed to nursing education that is rooted in a strong liberal arts and science foundation and that meets professional standards for nursing education and practice. The faculty seeks to prepare professional nurses who are capable of independent and collaborative problem-solving, decision-making, and the delivery and coordination of care to meet a wide range of client health care needs in a changing health care delivery system and a diverse society.
The graduate of the JMU baccalaureate nursing program will be able to demonstrate:
Health Promotion/Illness Care:
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 individuals families, aggregates, and communities. Comprehensive care refers to the types of nursing care and the range of clients described in this criterion. Community-based refers to care across a continuum from the hospital to the home, and from the individual to the community.
Critical Thinking:
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 what 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 decision-making process of assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation.
Therapeutic Relationships:
Develop caring relationships with clients that are sensitive to diverse personal, socio-cultural, and contextual 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 - reciprocal relationships in which that which is important to the client matters to the nurse. Caring nurses respect the culture, values, and beliefs of clients and consider the client's context when planning care; emphasizes that clients and their families should have primary responsibility for health care decisions.
Communication:
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. Therapeutic, or helpful, communication is basic to the nursing process and the teaching-learning process.
Professional Role Development:
Enhance professional role development as employee, team member, team leader, manager of team, care coordinator, and career manager.
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.
Ethical and Professional Self Development:
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 baccalaureate graduate. Self-awareness 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.
Scholarship:
Contribute to excellence in nursing care by scholarly contributions through discovery, integration, application, and teaching.
Rationale: In the scholarship of discovery students are involved in investigative research activities that include fact-finding, quality improvement, generating questions or testing hunches. The scholarship of integration involves the synthesis & critique of existing knowledge across disciplines. The scholarship of application involves developing competence in practice that is evidence and theory-based. The scholarship of teaching involves the innovative transmission of knowledge.
