Improving the Education of the Nursing Workforce: A Landmark Study From the Carnegie Foundation
Article Outline
A KEY PART of health care reform includes reforming and redesigning nursing education to effectively prepare nurses to continue to deliver high-quality, safe, and compassionate care as the health care system changes. Striving for higher academic standards for the preparation and education of the nursing workforce is not new. The nursing profession has struggled with and debated over requiring the baccalaureate as the entry into practice since 1965 when the American Nursing Association recommended this requirement. Forty-five years later, we continue this struggle. In the meantime, the knowledge and skills needed for optimum nursing care have become much more highly complex, with a greater need to understand and apply new technologies and translate new findings into practice. Despite the greater complexities of nursing care, we have yet to move our profession to require the baccalaureate as the minimum standard for all registered nurses.
Fortunately, we now have an outstanding new resource that provides systematically researched evidence, based on national surveys and interviews or site visits, that logically supports what the authors referred to as a “radical transformation” in nursing education. Benner, Sutphen, Leonard, and Day (2009) have written a landmark report, Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation, based on a study commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In this book, they called for sweeping reforms in how we educate the nursing workforce. They urged us to look at long-term changes rather than focusing predominantly on short-time fixes. The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, in fact, assisted with some of the data collection. I encourage the readers of this journal to read and consider the recommendations included in this provocative and critically important document. It is a call to seriously consider restructuring how we educate the nurses of the future so that they can be central players in a redesigned health care system, able to keep up with and respond to the social, technological, and scientific changes that are occurring rapidly.
Benner, Sutphen, Leonard, and Day (2009) emphasized a scholarship that includes a focus on science and technology as it relates to nursing practice and an emphasis on better integration of clinical and didactic experiences in an effort to teach students the value of translational science and research. The authors believed that most nursing educators are very effective in teaching clinical skills to students, but education can be improved in the areas of nursing science, the humanities, natural and social sciences, and technology. They suggested that clinical experiences need to be integrated with classroom education so that the clinical experiences provide a basis for making the classroom learning more meaningful and less abstract. With so much to learn and master, Benner et al. recommended that all nurses earn a baccalaureate degree and that within 10 years of obtaining that degree, they earn a master's degree. In addition, their recommendations include diversifying the clinical experiences that students receive, making sure that students experience a variety of clinical settings; developing and requiring residency programs for nurses after graduation; strengthening the focus on critical inquiry and research and scholarship in nursing programs; and encouraging leadership in health policy and in the political arena.
Of great importance as to why these recommendations are so critical is that there is strong evidence that links better educated nurses with increased patient safety. Better educated nurses who can embrace the complexities of the health care system and the ever-evolving scientific knowledge lead to better quality and safe patient care. It is time for the nursing profession to unite, to transcend the decades-old arguments about entry into practice, and to finally create new models for education in the interest of encouraging and enabling higher standards, higher quality, and greater safety in patient care. We are seeking these changes to contribute to an improved health care system.
It would be highly worthwhile for nursing faculty and students across the country to discuss the recommendations in the book. Even if there is disagreement on some of the recommendations, they provide a foundation for thoughtful discussion and debate. We must embrace such a debate and come together, despite our long-standing and myriad differences in pathways to be educated as nurses. We need to transcend our individual programs and reevaluate the educational needs for the nurses of today and the future. My hope is that this landmark book will serve as a catalyst for serious discussions that lead to constructive and forward-thinking changes in how we educate nurses. Such changes are long overdue, and this book may be just what we need to finally create them.
I would welcome letters to the editor about your thoughts on and responses to these recommendations. The Journal of Professional Nursing is a perfect forum to discuss, present, and debate your thoughts in an effort to strategize how to put these recommendations into practice. We need to take a leadership role in following up on this landmark study and in heeding the call for a radical transformation in nursing education.
Reference
PII: S8755-7223(10)00016-5
doi:10.1016/j.profnurs.2010.02.005
© 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc.
