Setting a Course for the Future

Nursing has always been a challenging, fast-paced, and highly-demanding profession. Now, with seemingly relentless growth in new scientific information and technological innovation—coupled with the rapidly changing landscape of healthcare delivery—add “complex” to the job description.

Nurses are required to possess depth of knowledge in such areas as normal and pathological physiology, pharmacology, physics, biology, and psychology.  They need to understand the mechanics of gas exchange in the lungs, cell-level transport of oxygen for acutely ill patients, and complicated titrations of multiple medications.

Today’s nurses must monitor and manage layers of sophisticated, often intrusive technology where the margin for error is hair-breadth thin. They are required to deliver care in diverse settings, from general and specialty hospitals to the hospice and home. As an aging population seeks to manage the symptoms of chronic disease, it is more than ever the role of the nurse to educate and instruct on self-care and long-term health maintenance. Nurses are also members of a sophisticated health-care team and need to master astute interpersonal skills interacting with a host of colleagues spanning the full range of the caring professions.

A Columbia Nursing education has long represented the summit of professional preparation, enabling its graduates to make a real and lasting difference in the lives of patients.  Today, the unprecedented expansion of knowledge, tools, and technology needed for skillful nursing practice represents an opportunity to revise our entry-level program. Under the leadership of the director for our BS/MS program, Karen Desjardins, MPH, DNP, Columba Nursing will soon be formally introducing significant changes to our entry-to-practice program. Our goal, however, will remain the same: ensuring that our graduates are well-equipped to meet the changes and challenges of a continually evolving profession.

The coming changes include a new curriculum, and even more significantly, beginning in the summer of 2015, we’ll be eliminating the bachelor’s aspect of our program and instituting a direct-entry master’s in nursing degree. Upon obtaining their master’s, students will sit for the NCLEX, receive their RN, and move directly into Columbia Nursing’s Doctor of Nursing Practice program.

The new master’s entry-to-practice curriculum will feature many of the offerings of today’s combined BS/MS program—with several major additions. First, because Columbia Nursing emphasizes the importance of translating new knowledge into nursing practice, students will be exposed, in their first semester, to an evidence-based-practice course. Themes will include orientation to research methods and limitations, interpretation of data, and applying new findings to practice.

Another addition to the curriculum will be “Introduction to Transitional Care.” Because nurses are increasingly responsible for the coordination and continuity of care as patients transition from one health care environment to another, this class will provide a deep understanding of the various settings and care teams involved in such shifts. The new curriculum will also supply a grounding in health policy, including the legal and regulatory framework that plays such a crucial role in the delivery and financing of healthcare today. Also included in the curriculum will be a foundation course in genetics and genomics, topics whose impact on the health care spectrum will only grow as the underlying science advances.

Columbia Nursing’s DNP program is distinguished by its focus on comprehensive care. No other institution prepares its graduates so comprehensively in caring for patients at all stages of life, in all care settings. Building on this proficiency, the new master’s entry-to-practice program will establish the groundwork for the DNP. For example, advanced classes on assessment, pathology, and pharmacology will be counted towards completion of the DNP.    

We at Columbia Nursing recognize our responsibility to furnish the next generation of nurses with a superb education—one that prepares them for delivering the finest, most compassionate care possible. We are also mindful of nursing’s traditions of responsibility, accountability, and ethical conduct. By preserving what is best in our field while adapting to the ever-changing demands of the contemporary healthcare world, we continue to set the pace for preparing the nurse leaders of tomorrow.