Nursing Education and Academic Career Learning and Competencies
Academic Practice Partnerships In Nursing Education
Partnerships and collaborative team-based care are the cornerstones of safe, effective care whether it be for individuals, families, communities, or populations. Academic practice partnerships serve to recruit and retain nurses and to support the practice and academic enterprise in relation to mutual research, leadership development, and a shared commitment to redesign practice environments.
Such partnerships also have the potential to facilitate the ability of nurses to achieve educational and career advancement, prepare nurses of the future to practice and lead, provide mechanisms for career long learning, and provide a structure for transition to practice programs. Successful academic-practice partnerships are predicated on respect, relationship, reciprocity, and co-design.
The 2016 report Advancing Healthcare Transformation: A New Era for Academic Nursing identified a path for achieving enhanced partnerships between nursing schools and academic health centers with the goals of achieving improved healthcare outcomes, fostering new models for innovation, and advancing integrated systems of health care.
While focused primarily on academic health centers, the recommendations apply to partnerships between non-academic health centers and schools of nursing as well.
The recommendations include enhancing the clinical practice of academic nursing; partnering in the preparation of the nurses of the future; collaborating to develop workforce plans in partnership with the health system; integrating academic nursing into population health initiatives; partnering in the implementation of Accountable Care; and partnering for optimal patient care and healthcare delivery (AACN, 2016).
Career Long Learning In Nursing Education
Current trends in higher education focus on supplemental methods of awarding credit and recognition for additional learning which has implications for career-long learning. Emerging educational methods should be considered as possible additions in the development of curriculum pathways in contemporary nursing education.
For example, the use of e-portfolios, which may be used to record competency achievement and educational milestones and continued throughout one's career, can be used to document personal development plans, badges, certifications, employment appraisals, and reflections on clinical events to establish meaning from various encounters.
Awarding of micro credentials or badges by academic institutions is also becoming popular. Badges recognize incremental learning in visible ways and can support career development (Educause, 2018). Stackable credentials can be accumulated over time and facilitate one's professional development along a career trajectory (Department of Labor, 2015).
Open access courses represent another way to learn a variety of skills or subject matter. All of these are important considerations in basic and advanced nursing education.
Competencies and Sub Competencies In Nursing Education
The competencies identified in this Essentials document provide a bridge between the current and future needs of practice and the requisite education to prepare a competent practitioner. Competence develops over time, is progressive, and reflects the impact of internal and external factors and experiences of the student. Internal factors include education, experience, knowledge, and professional orientation, among others.
External forces include the complexity of the learning experience and professional autonomy. While knowledge is essential to the development of competence, it does not in and of itself validate competence (Currier, 2019), Rather, learners progress to successive levels of competence by demonstrating achievement of expectations across the span of their education and practice experience.
Students are successful when they meet and sustain measurable competence at each level of performance expectation and are able to transfer their competence across different practice experiences and settings (Josiah Macy Foundation, 2017).
All competencies, organized within the 10 domains, are broad in scope and cross all levels and areas of nursing practice. The competition is intentionally written as a short statement; Therefore, it is necessary to be familiar with the contextual statement within the parent domain to fully understand the competition.
In other words, the competition is interpreted as a component within the domain. It should also be noted that there is intentional overlap of competencies in several domains to account for differences in the competency or sub-competency context in different domains.
Each competency statement has multiple sub-competencies written at two levels to reflect learner expectations for entry-level and advanced nursing education. These sub competencies are designed to 'paint a picture' of how the competency is achieved at each level.
The sub competencies are designed to be understandable, observable, and measurable by learner, faculty, and future employers. Competencies mature over time and become more sophisticated with ongoing practice.
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