School of Nursing

Indiana University School of Nursing one of only two schools of nursing invited to provide testimony for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation - Institute of Medicine Initiative on
the Future of Nursing: Focus on Nursing Education

Our preferred vision for the nursing profession is one where nurses will emerge as recognized leaders, central to health policy and patient advocacy. Nursing practice will be delivered through a patient-centered approach that spans the continuum of care, and nurses will be responsible for delivering and evaluating expert care across settings as well as managing the transitions among the settings. Practicing in interdisciplinary health care teams, nurses will be knowledge workers who understand the implications of practice in complex adaptive systems that are driven by technology, but dependent on high quality relationships for success. This new model of health care requires a new kind of nurse, one that is characterized as a systems thinker who uses knowledge to provide the highest value in care.

To achieve this preferred future we must radically transform our undergraduate clinical models, creating a greater emphasis upon academic-practice partnerships. A continued reliance upon fragmented clinical experiences no longer suffices. Clinical education needs to be re-designed to emphasize the continuum of care with associated transitional care and interdisciplinary, relationship-centered competencies. We propose one innovative clinical education model that would diminish fragmentation and prepare students for delivering transitional care is the creation of sustained “learning communities” consisting of student cohort and faculty teams in partnership with selected agencies and community entities. This unique education-practice-community partnership would facilitate student movement across care settings. To create our preferred vision of nursing, academic-practice partnerships must be formed to create seamless learning environments. To ensure the re-design of clinical education, federal funding with more rapid funding cycles is required to launch large-scale demonstration projects that will test new clinical education models.