Innovation in Nursing Education

How can nursing education bring innovation to the task of preparing nurses for a complex health care system? There are no simple answers to this question, but we do know that to be successful, we must challenge the mental models of nursing education that we carry from the past. The latest report from the Institute of Medicine on patient safety, Keeping Patients Safe: Transforming the Work Environment of Nurses, is another effort to improve the quality of health care (1). Its focus is the key role that nurses play with regard to patient safety and how improvements in working conditions can have a positive impact on safety. While nurses have intuitively known thai nursing care affects health and is sometimes a matter of life and death, research now supports the direct link between nursing care and patient outcomes. In nursing education, the need exists for innovation to prepare nurses to change environments and practice in new environments. However, incorporating an innovative response to rapid changes in health care presents a complex challenge for basic nursing education, the foundation on which nurses build their practice. Curricular changes, such as the NLN Curriculum Revolution of the 1980s, have often responded to a need for change. Webster distinguishes among several synonyms for change, pointing out that the word change carries the implication that there is an essential difference, amounting to a loss of original identity. Nursing education often takes the latest in information and technology and embeds them in a traditional curriculum with the same approaches Io leaching, essentially the same curricular structure, and with little change in clinical experience. Alter, vary, and modify are words that would seem to describe this practice. I wonder if it is again time for nursing education to truly change, or transform, itself. Transform implies a major change in structure, nature, and function. Convert, a synonym for transform, implies that change is made to respond to a new or different function. all of these words are ways to think about change in nursing education. Glouberman and Zimmerman (2) distinguish between simple problems that lend themselves to a recipe approach, complicated problems that are best approached with a formula and expert knowledge, and complex problems, such as finding ways to transform nursing education in a changing health care environment. Raising a child is presented as one example of a complex problem. It is clear that when one raises one child successfully, there is no guarantee for success with others. …