faculty focus
“ It’ s critical that we have a cadre of very well-educated mental health nurses,” Hinton says.
White also hopes more people will move into this field.“ Nurses used to be the focus of the delivery of care in mental health,” she says. And at Deakin, Duke says double degrees in nursing and psychology are growing in popularity.
Adaptability The head of nursing and midwifery at Murdoch University, associate professor Catherine Fetherston, says nurses always need to be adaptable.
“[ Students ] need to be able to think critically and creatively and that needs to be woven into everything that they do in the curriculum,” Fetherston says.
With technology consistently evolving, Hinton says change is an ordinary and accepted part of nursing.
Associate professor Tracey Moroney, dean of the School of Nursing at Notre Dame University, Australia, says,“ We’ re trying to educate our students to work in a technologically advanced age where knowledge is quickly outdated.” She says it’ s important to teach students to source knowledge.
“ If we don’ t give them the skills to actually find information or knowledge then they will be left behind,” Moroney says.
In attracting people to regional, rural and remote spaces, Hinton says, it’ s important to provide future nurses with the capacity to be resilient and flexible because working in such regions is so different from being in a metropolitan area.
Nurses are also looking at change management and resilience training, she says.
Nurse practitioner The nurse practitioner remains an important postgraduate educational offering, Duke says, adding that it has potential for expanded roles in the future, pending changes to government.
“ It’ s certainly an important element, particularly in regional and rural areas where there aren’ t as many doctors,” she says. Duke says whilst the role isn’ t a substitute for a doctor, it is a way to provide excellent healthcare for those who don’ t have as much access.
“ Research would demonstrate that people are highly satisfied with their interactions with the nurse practitioner and the care that they receive, so I think that course is important for the future,” she says.
Leadership skills Moroney says developing leadership skills is key for 2014.
“ Providing undergraduates with leadership training is very important,” she says.“ It’ s not just about developing skills and knowledge to manage patients; it’ s about skills to manage a workforce.”
She says this area is increasingly important due to changing models of care that have resulted in registered nurses working with teams that have a different mix of skills.
Duke agrees the RN workforce will need to spend more time than ever developing leadership skills.
“ The models of care and the way the workforce is made up have changed and are continuing to change, so there will be more unregulated workers as part of the healthcare team,” she says.
Delegations, accountability, responsibility and the management of people and conflict are all part of leadership and advanced practice that nurses will use much earlier in their career.
“ That will need to be a focus,” she says.“ It’ s already in most courses but it will need to be even more evident.”
International focus Internationalisation of the curriculum is something Fetherston noted as a trend within Murdoch.
The racial and ethnic diversity of the population is increasing, Murdoch’ s Fetherston says, making the pool of people giving and receiving care more diverse as well.“ In addition to that, I think [ nurses are ] also very mobile... and so they need to be able to develop international and intercultural perspectives when they’ re dealing with healthcare problems.”
Fetherston says future nurses need greater awareness of the varying cultural approaches to solving healthcare problems.
“ We need to provide them with problems in varied cultural contexts for them to study, and we need to encourage them to work in cross-cultural groups so they can develop an appreciation of other cultural views,” she says.
Providing students with intercultural interactions in clinical placements is also increasing in popularity. Fetherston says it’ s important that those involved are able to bring back their experiences to pass on to fellow students, including information on how they assessed and solved problems.
“ That’ s an increasingly important area that we all need to concentrate on,” she says.
Violence Students are often unprepared for the aggression and violence they may face in the workplace, Fetherston says, which is why Murdoch is focusing on this aspect of the profession in 2014.
“ We’ re finding that a high percentage of students are reporting that they are coming in contact with either physical or non-physical aggression and violence in the workplace,” she says.“ This is not an area that we have concentrated on from an education perspective.”
She says it is being seen in more acute areas because of how often drug and alcohol affected people are entering emergency departments, and in aged care due to diseases such as Alzheimer’ s. Fetherston says it’ s important to encourage students to learn from their experiences and build resilience, to instil the ability to recognise risks and develop skills that can help keep an incident from escalating.
“ We know what a high attrition rate there is in healthcare and in nursing because of the stress on healthcare workers, so that’ s certainly an area that we’ ve begun to concentrate on,” she says. n
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