Description

Nurses are the largest segment of health care professionals and often the first one to interact with individuals about their health and illness. Ensuring nurses have the education to care for individuals with serious illness are essential to quality health care. The new AACN essentials: Competencies for professional nursing education delineates hospice/palliative/supportive care as one of four spheres of nursing care. Surveying undergraduate schools/colleges of nursing in Massachusetts about content pertaining to care of individuals with serious illness provides the foundation for a state strategy to ensure quality primary palliative education for undergraduate nursing students.

A Massachusetts state wide college/school of nursing survey approach to assessing primary palliative nursing education within undergraduate baccalaureate nursing curricula was performed from June 2020 to December 2020. Because the project was collaboration with the Deans of the college/school of nursing, the survey identified the programs.

Assessment and evaluation in nursing education is directly aligned with Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing (ACEN) accreditation expectations. Although new nursing faculty may be experienced clinicians, they may not have a clear understanding of the concepts of assessment and evaluation within a nursing curriculum or how this is linked to the program's accreditation. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of curricular concepts, development of objectives and/or outcomes, evaluation of students, assessment of the overall program, as well as how these are incorporated into the ACEN accreditation Standards.

Education in Nursing

Assessment and evaluation are two fundamental processes used in nursing education. This article is written to provide a better understanding of the concepts of assessment and evaluation and how each applies to nursing education and Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing (ACEN) accreditation. The differences between assessment and evaluation will be described and an overview of how they are incorporated in the 2023 standards and criteria will be provided. This article begins with foundational definitions of assessment and evaluation, objectives and outcomes, and formative and summative processes. This article concludes with an overview of these elements as incorporated in standard curriculum and standard outcomes in the 2023 standards and criteria.

The Flipped Classroom (FC) refers to teaching a hybrid approach which online learning and face-to-face class activities. To increase student engagement, some nursing educators have redesigned the traditional lecture-based classroom (TC) to FC. This is an innovative instructional method that shifts the traditional usage of in-class time to out-of-class time. In the Flipped Classroom Method (FCM), instructors’ lectures are performed before class through instructional videos and prereadings, thereby releasing class time for active learning. The FC promotes active learning which can promote higher-orderthinking in nursing education. Such active learning may improve learning outcomes because students engage with and apply their pre-class learning.

One aim of transforming TC teaching to FCM is to enhance student engagement. Active student engagement leads to decreased dropout rates and improved academic performance. The results of meta-analytic reviews have shown that the use of the FCM could increase health professional students’ achievement compared with TC teaching. However, little is still known about its effect on student engagement. To fill this gap, Bond and Yang conducted a systematic review on promoting student engagement in flipped learning. They suggested that FCM generally support student engagement across studies.

This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of relevant studies regarding the effect of the FCM on student engagement in nursing education, focusing on behavioural, cognitive and emotional engagement. The FCM may potentially help to engage nursing students in learning. Using the framework of engagement, as defined by Fredricks et al. the following research questions are posed to guide the review.

Training of Specialist Nurses is of critical importance for the continued delivery of quality health services globally and in South Africa. In accordance with international trends, nursing education in South Africa has undergone significant educational reforms in the past few years. The aim of this paper is to critically reflect on current nursing education reform in South Africa and the implications for the postgraduate diploma in nursing programmes. The paper highlights some of the challenges encountered with the development, accreditation and implementation of the new nursing postgraduate diploma programmes. Successful nursing education reform requires collaborative and proactive conversations between all stakeholders before changes are made to existing nursing categories and skills mix, during the development of new programme frameworks, during programme development and after implementation of the reform strategies.

South Africa has committed to ensuring a competent nursing workforce through various educational reforms as well as occupational-specific dispensation. Occupational-specific dispensation refers to a revised salary structure that is unique to specially identified occupations, for example, certain nursing specialisations, in the public service. Education and training of both undergraduate and postgraduate nurses in South Africa are of critical importance to ensuring the continued delivery of quality health services in the country. Therefore, acknowledging the importance of the education of nurses in South Africa, the Nurse Educator, a specialist nurse who has completed a postgraduate nursing qualification, was added as one of the critical skills by the Minister of home affairs in 2022.