Discussion: Increasingly Complex Clinical

NOW F OR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT:Discussion: Increasingly Complex Clinical

As students become more experienced, increasingly complex clinical learning opportunities are selected to provide a sufficient breadth and depth of learning to develop the competence necessary for entrylevel practice with diverse patients across the life span in various types of settings. Through an immersion experience, students have the opportunity to develop increasing autonomy and assume an assignment that more closely approximates a realistic workload of a novice nurse in that environment.

A clinical immersion experience provides opportunities for building clinical reasoning, management, and evaluation skills. These opportunities increase the student’s self confidence, professional image, and sense of belonging that facilitate the transition to competent and confident practice. Immersion experiences allow students to integrate previous learning and more fully develop the roles of the baccalaureate generalist nurse:

• provider of care evaluate client changes and progress over time develop a beginning proficiency and efficiency in delivering safe care

• designer/manager/coordinator of care manage care transitions

35 be an active participant on the interprofessional team identify system issues develop working skills in delegation, prioritization, and oversight of care

• member of a profession evaluate one’s own practice assume responsibility for supporting the profession

An immersion experience provides faculty opportunities to observe student performance over time and more effectively evaluate the student’s professional development.

Graduates of all types of baccalaureate programs need sufficient didactic, laboratory, and clinical experiences to attain the endofprogram outcomes of these Essentials. The nursing program determines and assesses clinical sites to ensure the clinical experiences for students provide: • patients from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and of differing gender, religious, and

spiritual practices; • the continuum of care, including populationfocused care; • all age groups, including the very young and the frail elderly; and • comprehensive learning opportunities to promote integration of baccalaureate

learning outcomes that prepare the graduate for professional nursing practice.

Summary

The Essentials for Baccalaureate Education for Professional Nursing Practice serves to transform baccalaureate nursing education and are a dramatic revision of the 1998 version. Further, these Essentials meet the IOM’s recommendations for core knowledge needed for all healthcare professionals (IOM, 2003b). Due to the everchanging and complex healthcare environment, this document emphasizes such concepts as patient centered care, interprofessional teams, evidencebased practice, quality improvement, patient safety, informatics, clinical reasoning/critical thinking, genetics and genomics, cultural sensitivity, professionalism, practice across the lifespan, and endoflife care.