Integrating the Institute of Medicine Competencies in a Baccalaureate Curricular Revision: Process and Strategies

Serious deficiencies in the quality of patient care and safety, rapid changes in the health care environment, and technological advances have collectively influenced an urgent call for health professions education reform. The Institute of Medicine (2003) has proposed a set of five core competencies that all health care professionals should possess and has recommended that these be used as an overarching vision for all health care professional education in the 21st century. These competencies have been incorporated into the newly revised American Association of Colleges of Nursing's Essentials of Baccalaureate Education document (2008).

The purpose of this article is to describe the process of a recent baccalaureate curricular revision at one School of Nursing that used the Institute of Medicine competencies as part of an innovative framework to create a new curriculum. Strategies to incorporate newly recommended student competencies while preventing content overload are presented. The change process and implications for nursing education are explored. Finally, lessons learned with recommendations for nurse educator colleagues who are undertaking the challenge of curricular revision are discussed.

Index words: Curriculum, Baccalaureate curriculum, Curriculum innovation, Baccalaureate nursing education, Curricular models, Curricular framework