Question

Goal Ranking and Matching

Class, take a minute to list three to five of your goals associated with attaining your BSN as related to this course, and explain why you think these goals are important.

Answer 1

Ans) The future of access to basic primary care and nursing education will depend on increasing the number of BSN-prepared nurses.

- Unless this goal is met, the committee’s recommendations for greater access to primary care; enhanced, expanded, and reconceptualized roles for nurses; and updated nursing scopes of practice (see Chapter 7) cannot be achieved. The committee believes that increasing the proportion of the nursing workforce with a BSN from the current 50 percent to 80 percent by 2020 is bold but achievable.

- Achieving this target will help meet future demand for nurses qualified for advanced practice positions and possessing competencies in such areas as community care, public health, health policy, evidence-based practice, research, and leadership. The committee concludes further that the number of nurses holding a doctorate must be increased to produce a greater pool of nurses prepared to assume faculty and research positions.

- The committee believes a target of doubling the number of nurses with a doctorate by 2020 would meet this need and is achievable.

- To achieve these targets, however, will require overcoming a number of barriers. The numbers of educators and clinical placements are insufficient for all the qualified applicants who wish to enter nursing school. There also is a shortage of faculty to teach nurses at all levels. Incentives for nurses at any level to pursue further education are few, and there are active disincentives against advanced education. Nurses and physicians—not to mention pharmacists and social workers—typically are not educated together and yet are increasingly required to cooperate and collaborate more closely in the delivery of care.

- To address these barriers, innovative new programs to attract nursing faculty and provide a wider range of clinical education placements must clear long-stand ing bottlenecks. To this end, market-based salary adjustments must be made for faculty, and more scholarships must be provided to help nursing students advance their education. Accrediting and certifying organizations must mandate demonstrated mastery of clinical skills, managerial competencies, and professional development at all levels. Mandated skills, competencies, and professional development milestones must be updated on a more timely basis to keep pace with the rapidly changing demands of health care. All health professionals should receive more of their education in concert with students from other disciplines. Efforts also must be made to increase the diversity of the nursing workforce.

- The nursing profession must adopt a framework of continuous lifelong learning that includes basic education, academic progression, and continuing competencies. More nurses must receive a solid education in how to manage complex conditions and coordinate care with multiple health professionals. They must demonstrate new competencies in systems thinking, quality improvement, and care management and a basic understanding of health care policy. Graduate-level nurses must develop an even deeper understanding of care coordination, quality improvement, systems thinking, and policy.

- The committee emphasizes further that, as discussed in Chapter 2, the ACA is likely to accelerate the shift in care from the hospital to the community setting. This transition will have a particularly strong impact on nurses, more than 60 percent of whom are currently employed in hospitals.

- Nurses may turn to already available positions in primary or chronic care or in public or community health, or they may pursue entirely new careers in emerging fields that they help create. Continuing and graduate education programs must support the transition to a future that rewards flexibility.

- In addition, the curriculum at many nursing schools, which places heavy emphasis on preparing students for employment in the acute care setting, will need to be rethought .