BSN Program Outcomes

Mission

The purpose of the Baccalaureate Nursing Program is to prepare a professional nurse whose practice is based upon nursing science, related sciences and the arts in order to promote, restore, and maintain the health of a diverse global community. University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Nursing is committed to an interdisciplinary model of holistic health care, which emphasizes scholarship, leadership, and service in a rapidly changing and complex environment. Graduates of this program are generalists with the necessary foundation for graduate education and continuing professional development.


Program Goals

The UMKC School of Nursing BSN Program:

    1. Provides a broad knowledge base for evidenced-based, clinically competent, professional practice in the care of individuals, groups, families, communities, and populations.
    2. Prepares nursing leaders in professional roles and attributes.
    3. Develops nurses for integration into the dynamic complex healthcare system, within a global context, as empowered change agents.

 
Description of the Educational Framework for the UMKC School of Nursing – B.S.N. Pre-Licensure (BSN-PL) program

The transformational model applied to the BSN-PL program states that a person cannot effectively manage in a complex environment until he or she can first manage him/herself. In a developmental manner, students will progress from awareness to knowledge through proficiency in the eleven essential BSN competencies defined below. These competencies are applied and developed in one of the following four stages of personal development in complex systems: personal effectiveness, interpersonal effectiveness, effectiveness in human health outcomes, and effectiveness in complex health systems.


Student Learning Outcomes:

Upon graduation the student will:

    1. incorporate knowledge from arts, humanities and sciences in the planning and provision of professional nursing care.
    2. demonstrate Personal Effectiveness as evidenced by progressing from awareness to knowledge to proficiency in the following competencies: Critical Thinking, Professional Valuing/Caring, and Professional Role Development.
    3. demonstrate Interpersonal Effectiveness as evidenced by progressing from awareness to knowledge to proficiency in the following competencies: Communication, Teaching/Learning, and Technology Utilization.
    4. demonstrate Effectiveness in Human Health Outcomes as evidenced by progressing from awareness to knowledge to proficiency in the following competencies: Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and Evidence-Based Care.
    5. demonstrate Effectiveness Within Complex Health Systems as evidenced by progressing from awareness to knowledge to proficiency in the following competencies: Leadership/Management, Global Perspectives, and Health Care Systems and Policy.


Definitions of the four stages of personal development

    Personal Effectiveness is defined as assumption of responsibility and accountability for self, life long learning, and career planning.

    Interpersonal Effectiveness is defined as the ability to collaborate using various channels of communication to function with an interdisciplinary team.

    Effectiveness in Human Health Outcomes is defined as the ability to function in the health care community by providing evidence based care and evaluating patient care outcomes in a variety of settings.

    Effectiveness within Complex Health Systems is defined as the ability to function as an empowered change agent in the global health community.


Baccalaureate Prepared Nurse Competencies Across the Core Nursing Curriculum

These competencies are threaded progressing from awareness to knowledge to proficiency throughout the nursing curriculum, guided by program goals, educational framework and course objectives. (thus, each competency will not necessarily be addressed in each course.) These competencies will be utilized in the evaluation mechanisms for each course.

1. Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is the rational and reflective process of making judgments. This process underlies independent and interdependent nursing decisions and provides the basis for reflective nursing practice. Critical thinking includes the ability to tolerate and embrace ambiguity as a natural phenomenon within the human experience.

2. Communication
 Communication is a complex, ongoing, interactive process and forms the basis for building interpersonal relationships. Communication includes listening, as well as verbal, nonverbal, written and electronic communication skills. The professional nurse appropriately adapts the communication style to the audience, considering such elements as culture, education, and environment.

3. Evidence-Based Care
The professional nurse generalist utilizes multiple ways of knowing, including personal, ethical, scientific and esthetic in the delivery of care to individuals, families, communities or populations to address their health needs. The provision of care may be direct or indirect in partnership with the patient and the interdisciplinary health care team to affect a positive health outcome.

4. Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
Health care directed toward high-level wellness through processes that encourage alteration of personal habits or the environment in which people live. It occurs after health stability is present and assumes disease prevention and health maintenance as pre-requisites or by-products. (Brubaker, 83)

5. Leadership/Management
The leader/manager is responsible for human, fiscal, and material resources and exhibits specific behaviors and strategies, such as delegation, collaboration, negotiation, and coordination to influence individuals and groups toward goal setting and achievement.

6. Technology Utilization
Technology utilization includes current and developing methods and equipment that lead to discovery, retrieval, and utilization of information to enhance nursing practice. These technologies may include, but are not limited to equipment that may provide assessment data, support anatomic and physiologic function, utilize data from an electronic health record, and provide access to most current evidence to support practice standards.

7. Professional Valuing/Caring
Values are defined as beliefs or ideas to which an individual is committed and which guide behavior. Values include advocacy, altruism, ethical reasoning, equality, autonomy, human dignity, diversity, morality, social justice, and integrity. Caring encompasses both the nurse’s empathy for and connection with the patient, and the nurse’s ability to translate these affective characteristics into compassionate, culturally sensitive care for each patient’s diverse needs.

8. Professional Role Development
Role development is the process of acquiring knowledge and experiences that will encourage graduates to embrace lifelong learning incorporate professionalism and accountability into their practices and identify with the values of the profession.

9. Global Perspectives
Global health care knowledge includes an understanding of the effects of the culturally diverse community from individual to global perspectives on such areas as disease transmission, violence, health policy, and healthcare economics.

10. Health Care Systems and Policy
 The professional nurse generalist understands the organization and environment in which nursing and health care is provided. This content and practice includes the dynamic relationships among institutions and organizations, public policy, economic and political factors, legal and regulatory processes, and funding mechanisms.

11. Teaching/Learning
Teaching/Learning is a dynamic, lifelong interactive process that has formal and informal elements. Formal teaching/learning occurs between two or more people, including a teacher and a learner. It consists of a set of planned, purposeful activities that assist the learner(s) in the acquisition of knowledge, attitudes, and/or the performance of new skills. Informal teaching/learning process may involve one or more persons who may or may not be identified as a teacher or a learner. It consists of unplanned, spontaneous activities that enable a person to acquire new knowledge, attitudes or skills.


All of the above criteria were developed using the following:

    1. Essentials of Baccalaureate Education for Professional Nursing Practice, AACN,1998
    2. Mission statement and goals of Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education, AACN, 2/21/97
    3. Description of curricular components developed by SON Conceptual Frameworks Task Forces, 1/16/98,
    4. School of Nursing Strategic Plan 2002-2007
    5. Philosophy of the School of Nursing, approved 1/31/2007
    6. Definitions of criteria categories developed by faculty at faculty retreat, Fall, 1997
    7. Competencies and program objectives draft developed by the BSN Program Committee, based upon nursing literature analysis, adopted 4/97, revised, 07/06, 04/07
    8. ANA Social Policy Statement, ANA Standards for Clinical Practice, ANA Code for Nurses.
    9. Principle Centered Leadership, Stephen Covey, 1998