The nursing faculty of Kennesaw State University is in agreement with the mission statements of the University and College, and accepts the rights and responsibilities to provide professional nursing education. The School of Nursing contributes to the purpose of the University by preparing students within a liberal and democratic educational environment to achieve their personal and professional goals, and become responsible citizens and lifelong learners. The faculty of the School of Nursing believe that the statement of philosophy and purpose of the programs in nursing is supportive of that of Kennesaw State University. The School of Nursing's philosophy reflects the faculty's beliefs about nursing, health, human beings, and the environment, as well as the roles of the baccalaureate nurse and master's prepared nurse practitioner, the teaching-learning process, and nursing education.
Nursing is the art and science of caring. The focus of nursing is to provide a caring presence and to create an environment that facilitates healing of persons, families, groups, and communities. Caring, as the essence and central focus of nursing, is what makes persons, their environments and interpersonal concerns meaningful. Caring in action consists of philosophical, interpersonal, and technical components that interface to facilitate caring interactions and caring environments. Professional nurse caring combines cognitively and culturally learned behaviors, actions, and techniques that enable the creation of healthy, healing environments for nurses, clients, and colleagues. The ethics of care and responsibility involves moral agency, interdependence, and professional integrity.
Nursing is committed to the promotion of holistic health of individuals, families, groups, and communities. Holistic health is encouraged through prevention, education, advocacy, and facilitation of behaviors and lifestyles that support well-being. Health is a dynamic, evolving process that encompasses an ongoing integration of mind, body, and spirit in interactive harmony with the environment. This holistic process is individually perceived, multidimensional in focus, and behaviorally unique to each human being throughout the life span, including end-of-life care.
Humans are unique thinking, feeling, sensing, social beings who are motivated toward meeting human needs; they are complex, multifaceted persons, who embody physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions. Humans exist as individuals and as members of families, groups, and communities sharing commonalities yet maintaining diversity. Human diversity includes, but may not be limited to, considerations of age, gender, religion, race, ethnicity, culture, lifestyle, socioeconomic class, and sexual orientation. A client is a person who is in need of nursing care and may be vulnerable either as an individual or as a member of a group(s). Clients possess rights and responsibilities and are entitled to autonomy, privacy, dignity, respect, and just treatment.
All humans influence and are influenced by the political, social, cultural, economic, technologic, genetic, and ecologic conditions that constitute their environments. The environment affects one's ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle and to cope with episodes of illness. Environmental concerns are no longer restricted by regional, national, or international boundaries. Heightened global consciousness, increased international mobility, advanced information and communication technologies, and changing relationships among persons impact the health and welfare of the world's citizenry. Cognizant of this global responsibility, nurses have the potential to positively influence the environment of individuals and communities. Nursing education prepares nurses to understand health care delivery systems as shaped by health care policy, and societal norms and expectations.
As society and the health needs of humans evolve, the role of the professional nurse unfolds and boundaries of nursing practice expand. Responses to these changes influence the educational preparation of undergraduate and graduate nursing students. Critical examination of health care issues and practices encourages reasoning, reflection, intuition, application, creativity, and the consideration of alternatives with respect for differing points of view. The freedom to make independent and interdependent judgments, and to evaluate experiences in a variety of health care situations is essential to the development of competent, caring professionals prepared to meet the challenges of the future.
The faculty believe that undergraduate nursing education prepares nurse generalists and is best accomplished in an institution of higher learning where the natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities form a knowledge base that enriches nursing education. These various disciplines provide a theoretical knowledge base necessary for understanding the meaning of experiences for human beings. In addition, liberal education promotes critical thinking, and encourages the effective articulation of ideas in written and spoken forms. Graduate education builds on the knowledge and competencies of baccalaureate education in nursing and provides for the attainment of advanced knowledge and practice of nursing.
Baccalaureate nursing education provides a broad, diversified knowledge base on which to build a safe, comprehensive professional practice. The nurse prepared at the baccalaureate level uses critical thinking, clinical judgment, and communication skills to assist clients to achieve an optimal level of health in a wide variety of health care settings. In order to achieve this, the faculty identified six interrelated roles or processes of the baccalaureate degree nurse as adapted from The Essentials of Baccalaureate Nursing Education for Professional Nursing Practice (AACN, 1998), Standards of Clinical Nursing Practice (ANA, 1998), and Nursing's Social Policy Statement (ANA, 1995). These six processes include provider of care, communicator, teacher, manager, professional and researcher. Based upon nursing and related principles, concepts and theories, baccalaureate education also provides the foundation for graduate study.
Nurse practitioner graduate education expands on the broad, diversified knowledge base of baccalaureate nursing education and is distinguished from basic nursing practice by "autonomy to practice at the edges of the expanding boundaries of nursing's scope of practice" (ANA, 1995, p.16), greater complexity of decision-making, and greater skill in managing organizations, and environments. The Domains and Competencies of Nurse Practitioner Practice as defined by the National Organization of Nurse Practitioner Faculties (2000) provide the organizing framework and serve as the foundation for learning opportunities appropriate to the master's level nurse practitioner student. The domains are clusters of competencies and reflect the scope and practice of the nurse practitioner. Specific competencies are embedded within each domain. These domains describe the performance of the nurse practitioner as the following: manager of the client health/illness status; facilitator of the nurse-client relationship; enabler of the teaching-coaching function; a professional; manager and negotiator of health care delivery systems; monitor and insurer of the quality of the health care practice; and, provider of culturally competent nursing care.
Nurse practitioner graduate education incorporates guided practice opportunities to provide various primary care experiences in an advanced practice setting. These experiences enable nurse practitioner students to synthesize nursing and health-related knowledge, while pursuing a philosophy of client-focused advanced practice nursing based on a strong theoretical and research foundation. In addition, nurse practitioner graduate education prepares the student to assume a leadership role in the profession, including expertise in health care financing, delivery, and policy.
Master's prepared nurse practitioners use critical thinking and clinical judgment to make interdependent and independent clinical decisions as they transition into the advanced practice role. As advocates and direct providers of care, they are accountable to the client, themselves, and the profession for their practice. The nurse practitioner prepared at the master's level employs therapeutic and professional communication techniques for consultation and mutual referrals that guide both the client and health care provider in achieving realistic health care goals. In providing primary health care to individuals, families, and/or communities, nurse practitioners coordinate services and manage actual and potential health problems as well as human responses to these health problems. Emphasis is placed on the promotion of health, the prevention of disease, and the facilitation of appropriate self care. Nursing actions are culturally congruent, holistic, and are intended to guide nurse practitioner practice to facilitate beneficial outcomes for the client, family, and/or community.
The faculty of the School of Nursing believe that learning is an active, dynamic and lifelong process, and is committed to providing educational mobility for all levels of professional nursing. This can be accomplished in part by offering flexible and innovative instructional modalities including distance learning and portfolio development. Personal and professional growth is enhanced through the experience of learning and exposure to various peoples, information, cultures, modes of thought, ways of being, and ideas. The learning process encourages the emergence of and respect for diverse perspectives, attitudes and feelings, and promotes change in behavior and thought. Learning is individualistic: persons learn in a variety of ways that are responsive to creative, diverse, and participant-engaging activities. These activities include the student as teacher and the teacher as learner as they strive for increasing immersion into the knowledge, information, and wisdom of the theory and practice that is nursing.
Learning is encouraged in an atmosphere of interpersonal interaction fostered by a trust relationship between the teacher and learner. Faculty function as facilitators, planners, supervisors, communicators, role models, and colleagues. The environment of education is enhanced by a mutually supportive, caring, and respectful atmosphere where the participants guide each other toward increasing independence, self-knowledge, and knowledge of the art and science of nursing. Learning is enhanced by a climate of shared responsibility and ongoing personal and collective evaluation which fosters individual and professional growth. |
