The baccalaureate program prepares the graduate to:

The baccalaureate program prepares the graduate to:

1. Apply leadership concepts, skills, and decision making in the provision of high quality nursing care, healthcare team coordination, and the oversight and accountability for care delivery in a variety of settings.

2. Demonstrate leadership and communication skills to effectively implement patient safety and quality improvement initiatives within the context of the interprofessional team.

3. Demonstrate an awareness of complex organizational systems.

4. Demonstrate a basic understanding of organizational structure, mission, vision, philosophy, and values.

5. Participate in quality and patient safety initiatives, recognizing that these are complex system issues, which involve individuals, families, groups, communities, populations, and other members of the healthcare team.

6. Apply concepts of quality and safety using structure, process, and outcome measures to identify clinical questions and describe the process of changing current practice.

7. Promote factors that create a culture of safety and caring.

8. Promote achievement of safe and quality outcomes of care for diverse populations.

9. Apply quality improvement processes to effectively implement patient safety initiatives and monitor performance measures, including nurse­sensitive indicators in the microsystem of care.

10. Use improvement methods, based on data from the outcomes of care processes, to design and test changes to continuously improve the quality and safety of health care.

11. Employ principles of quality improvement, healthcare policy, and cost­effectiveness to assist in the development and initiation of effective plans for the microsystem and/or system­wide practice improvements that will improve the quality of healthcare delivery.

12. Participate in the development and implementation of imaginative and creative strategies to enable systems to change.

Sample Content

• leadership, including theory, behaviors, characteristics, contemporary approaches, leadership development, and styles of leadership

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• leadership skills and strategies (negotiating, collaborating, coordinating); decision making to promote quality patient care in a variety of healthcare settings

• change theory and complexity science • community organizing models • social change theories • creative and imaginative strategies in problem solving • communication, including elements, channels, levels, barriers, models,

organizational communication, skill development, workplace communication, conflict resolution, optimizing patient care outcomes, and chain­of­command

• principles of interpersonal interactions/communication • healthcare systems (structure and finance) and organizational structures and

relationships (e.g., between finance, organizational structure, and delivery of care, particularly at the microsystem level, including mission/vision/philosophy and values)

• reliability and reliability sciences in health care • operations research, queuing theory, and systems designs in health care • teamwork skills, including effective teams/characteristics, application to patient

care teams, team process, conflict resolution, delegation, supervision, and collaboration

• microsystems and their relationship to complex systems, quality care, and patient safety

• patient safety principles, including safety standards, organizational safety processes, reporting processes, departmental responsibilities, ownership, national initiatives, and financial implications

• quality improvement (QI), including history, elements, Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) models, concepts, principles, benchmarking, processes, tools, departmental ownership, roles/responsibility, methodologies, regulatory requirements, organizational structures for QI, outcomes, monitoring, Quality Assurance (QA) vs. QI, beginning resource need assessment, and resource identification, acquisition, and evaluation

• overview of QI process techniques, including benchmarks, basic statistics, root cause analyses, and Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) in the quality improvement process

• principles of nursing care delivery management and evaluation

Essential III: Scholarship for Evidence­Based Practice

Rationale

Professional nursing practice is grounded in the translation of current evidence into practice. Scholarship for the baccalaureate graduate involves identification of practice issues; appraisal and integration of evidence; and evaluation of outcomes. As practitioners at the point of care, baccalaureate nurses are uniquely positioned to monitor patient outcomes and identify practice issues. Evidence­based practice models provide a

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systematic process for the evaluation and application of scientific evidence surrounding practice issues (IOM, 2003b). Dissemination is a critical element of scholarly practice; baccalaureate graduates are prepared to share evidence of best practices with the interprofessional team.

Baccalaureate education provides a basic understanding of how evidence is developed, including the research process, clinical judgment, interprofessional perspectives, and patient preference as applied to practice. This basic understanding serves as a foundation for more complex applications at the graduate level (AACN, 2006a). Baccalaureate nurses integrate reliable evidence from multiple ways of knowing to inform practice and make clinical judgments. In collaboration with other healthcare team members, graduates participate in documenting and interpreting evidence for improving patient outcomes (AACN, 2006b).

In all healthcare settings, ethical and legal precepts guide research conduct to protect the rights of patients eligible for, or participating in, investigations. Professional nurses safeguard patient rights, including those of the most vulnerable patients, in situations where an actual or potential conflict of interest, misconduct, or the potential for harm are identified.

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